| weak habitat specificity in ectomycorrhizal communities associated with salix herbacea and salix polaris in alpine tundra. | this study explores mid-alpine ectomycorrhizal communities on salix herbacea and salix polaris in plant communities differing in nutrient status and snow conditions. plant species were identified by tracking roots back to above ground structures while fungal species were identified using molecular methods. the fungi were identified to 34 molecular operational taxonomic units (motus)/species but species accumulation curves indicated that the communities were only partially sampled. the estimated ... | 2011 | 20680357 |
| low host specificity of root-associated fungi at an arctic site. | in high arctic ecosystems, plant growth and reproduction are limited by low soil moisture and nutrient availability, low soil and air temperatures, and a short growing season. mycorrhizal associations facilitate plant nutrient acquisition and water uptake and may therefore be particularly ecologically important in nutrition-poor and dry environments, such as parts of the arctic. similarly, endophytic root associates are thought to play a protective role, increasing plants' stress tolerance, and ... | 2014 | 24382270 |
| balancing positive and negative plant interactions: how mosses structure vascular plant communities. | our understanding of positive and negative plant interactions is primarily based on vascular plants, as is the prediction that facilitative effects dominate in harsh environments. it remains unclear whether this understanding is also applicable to moss-vascular plant interactions, which are likely to be influential in low-temperature environments with extensive moss ground cover such as boreal forest and arctic tundra. in a field experiment in high-arctic tundra, we investigated positive and neg ... | 2011 | 21279654 |
| aphid-willow interactions in a high arctic ecosystem: responses to raised temperature and goose disturbance. | recently, there have been several studies using open top chambers (otcs) or cloches to examine the response of arctic plant communities to artificially elevated temperatures. few, however, have investigated multitrophic systems, or the effects of both temperature and vertebrate grazing treatments on invertebrates. this study investigated trophic interactions between an herbivorous insect (sitobion calvulum, aphididae), a woody perennial host plant (salix polaris) and a selective vertebrate graze ... | 2013 | 23749580 |
| use of length heterogeneity polymerase chain reaction (lh-pcr) as non-invasive approach for dietary analysis of svalbard reindeer, rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus. | to efficiently investigate the forage preference of svalbard reindeer (rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus), we applied length-heterogeneity polymerase chain reaction (lh-pcr) based on length differences of internal transcribed spacer (its) regions of ribosomal rna (rrna) to fecal samples from r. tarandus platyrhynchus. a length-heterogeneity (lh) database was constructed using both collected potential food sources of svalbard reindeer and fecal samples, followed by pcr, cloning and sequencing. in t ... | 2014 | 24618847 |