The emergence of renewable energy infrastructures calls for a better understanding of their impact on biodiversity. The aim of the present study was to investigate in a mountain region the impact of a wind turbine on plant communities in their vicinity. A ...
Aquatic oligochaetes are important bioindicators of sediment quality in watercourses and lakes, but their morphological identification to the species level is challenging and sometimes impossible. The use of DNA barcoding and metabarcoding could greatly fac ...
Understanding how different food resources sustain stream food webs is fundamental towards increasing our knowledge on trophic structure and energy flow pathways in fluvial ecosystems. 2. Food webs in small mountain streams are sustained by autochthonou ...
Biodiversity patterns are governed by landscape structure and dispersal strategies of residing organisms. Landscape, however, changes, and dispersal strategies evolve with it. It is unclear how these biological and geomorphological changes interplay to aff ...
Natural soil is characterized as a complex habitat with patchy hydrated islands and spatially variable nutrients that is in a constant state of change due to wetting-drying dynamics. Soil microbial activity is often concentrated in sparsely distributed hot ...
Plants and microbes release a plethora of volatiles that act as signals in plant-microbe interactions. Characterizing soil's volatilome and microbiome might shed light on the nature of relevant volatile signals and on their emitters. This hypothesis was te ...
Microbial communities are often highly diverse in their composition, both at a coarse-grained taxonomic level, such as genus, and at a highly resolved level, such as strains, within species. This variability can be driven by either extrinsic factors such a ...
This thesis is concerned with regular patterns found in ecology and biology, their linkages and the statistical description of their fluctuations around average trends. Among such patterns, often conforming to power laws, well-known examples include the Sp ...
Sphagnum mosses mediate long-term carbon accumulation in peatlands. Given their functional role as keystone species, it is important to consider their responses to ecological gradients and environmental changes through the production of phenolics. We compa ...
