Plant-induced soil changes: Processes and feedbacks

This book consists of papers presented at a symposium "PLANT-INDUCED SOIL CHANGES: PROCESSES AND FEEDBACKS" that was held during the American Society of Agronomy-Soil Science Society of America Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, November 4-8, 1996. The papers were also pub of Biogeochemistry (Vol. 42, nos. 1 and 2, 1998). The lished in a special issue symposium was built on the growing realisation that plant-induced changes in soil feed back in various ways to natural vegetations, giving rise to a plethora of plant-soil interactions beyond the classical one-way cause-and-effect pathways plant-to-soil and soil-to-plant. The aim of this special issue is not in the first place to present new research findings, but to review and discuss the more holistic aspects of plant-soil interactions, providing more room for speculation than do most collections of research papers. After a general introduction which emphasises ecological and evolutionary aspects of plant-soil interac~ions (van Breemen and Finzi), three papers deal with particular effects of plants on soil properties: mineralogy (Kelly et al. ), soil structure (Angers and Caron) and soil fertility (Berendse). Next, five papers take up plant-soil interactions in specific biomes: forests (Binkley and Giardina; Gobran et al. ), grasslands (Burke et al. ; Epstein et al. ) and deserts (Schlesinger and Pilmanis). Two papers discuss plant-soil interactions via effects of differences in litter quality in specific ecosystems: California's pygmy forest (Northup et al. ) and the Alaskan Taiga (Schimel et al. ).

Plant soil interactions: ecological aspects and evolutionary implications. - The effect of plants on mineral weathering. - Plant-induced changes in soil structure: Processes and feedbacks. - Effects of dominant plant species on soils during succession in nutrient-poor ecosystems. - Why do tree species affect soils? The Warp and Woof of tree soil interactions. - Rhizospheric processes influencing the biogeochemistry of forest ecosystems. - Plant soil interactions in temperate grasslands. - Plant functional type effects on trace gas fluxes in the shortgrass steppe. - Plant soil interactions in deserts. - Polyphenols as regulators of plant litter soil interactions in northern California s pygmy forest: A positive feedback? . - The role of balsam poplar secondary chemicals in controlling soil nutrient dynamics through succession in the Alaskan taiga. - The bio in aluminum and silicon geochemistry.