Elise Pendall

Western Sydney University · Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment (HIE)

The efficacy of alternative nitrogenous fertilizers for mitigating greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions from a rice-wheat cropping system in northern India was addressed in a laboratory incubation experiment using soil from a 10-year residue management field experiment (crop residue removal, CRR, vs. incorporation, CRI). Neem coated urea (NCU), sta...

Plant community biodiversity can be maintained, at least partially, by shifts in species interactions between facilitation and competition for resources as environmental conditions change. These interactions also drive ecosystem functioning, including productivity, and can promote over-yielding-an ecosystem service prioritized in working landscapes...

Sustaining grassland production in a changing climate requires an understanding of plant adaptation strategies, including trait plasticity under warmer and drier conditions. However, our knowledge to date disproportionately relies on aboveground responses, despite the importance of belowground traits in maintaining aboveground growth, especially in...

Grassland responses to rainfall are characterised by leaf phenology, with greening and browning being highly sensitive to soil moisture. However, this process is represented overly simplistically in most vegetation models, limiting their capacity to predict grassland responses to global change factors. We derive functions representing grassland phe...

Climate change, disturbance, and plant invasion threaten grassland ecosystems, but their combined and interactive effects are poorly understood. Here, we examine how the combination of disturbance and plant invasion influences the sensitivity of mixed‐grass prairie to elevated carbon dioxide (eCO2) and warming. We established subplots of intact pra...

Soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition and organic phosphorus (P) cycling may help sustain plant productivity under elevated CO2 (eCO2) and low-P conditions. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and their role in P-acquisition and SOM decomposition may become more relevant in these conditions. Yet, experimental evidence of AM fungi and P availability...

Successful use of hyperspectral imaging technology to progress precision agriculture is highly dependent on calibration on species of interest. To date, high-throughput hyperspectral imaging to predict plant growth and nutrient content has largely been limited to single-species cultivations. Therefore, this study aimed to calibrate a range of agron...

In rapidly urbanizing areas, natural vegetation becomes fragmented, making conservation planning challenging, particularly as climate change accelerates fire risk. We studied urban forest fragments in two threatened eucalypt-dominated (scribbly gum woodland, SGW, and ironbark forest, IF) communities across ~2000 ha near Sydney, Australia, to evalua...

The effects of climate change on plants and ecosystems are mediated by plant hydraulic traits, including interspecific and intraspecific variability of trait phenotypes. Yet, integrative and realistic studies of hydraulic traits and climate change are rare. In a semiarid grassland, we assessed the response of several plant hydraulic traits to eleva...

Plant species show a broad spectrum of plasticity in their covarying root traits in response to soil water limitation ranging from no change to shift towards traits that enhance water and nutrient acquisition. Knowledge of root trait correlations and associated trait plasticity under drought is crucial to sustaining grassland production, including...

Grassland responses to drought are strongly mediated by leaf phenology, with greening and browning being highly sensitive to soil moisture. However, this process is represented overly simplistically in most vegetation models, limiting their capacity to predict grassland responses to global change factors. We derive functions representing grassland...

Carbon allocation determines plant growth, fitness and reproductive success. However, climate warming and drought impacts on carbon allocation patterns in grasses are not well known, particularly following grazing or clipping. A widespread C3 pasture grass, Festuca arundinacea, was grown at 26 and 30 ℃ in controlled environment chambers and subject...

In 2020, the Australian and New Zealand flux research and monitoring network, OzFlux, celebrated its 20th anniversary by reflecting on the lessons learned through two decades of ecosystem studies on global change biology. OzFlux is a network not only for ecosystem researchers, but also for those ‘next users’ of the knowledge, information and data t...

Shifts in the timing, intensity and/or frequency of climate extremes, such as severe drought and heatwaves, can generate sustained shifts in ecosystem function with important ecological and economic impacts for rangelands and managed pastures. The Pastures and Climate Extremes experiment (PACE) in Southeast Australia was designed to investigate the...

Not only do soils provide 98.7% of the calories consumed by humans, they also provide numerous other functions upon which planetary survivability closely depends. However, our continuously increasing focus on soils for biomass provision (food, fiber, and energy) through intensive agriculture is rapidly degrading soils and diminishing their capacity...

• Symbiotic fungi mediate important energy and nutrient transfers in terrestrial ecosystems. Environmental change can lead to shifts in communities of symbiotic fungi, but the consequences of these shifts for nutrient dynamics among symbiotic partners are poorly understood. • Here, we assessed variation in carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P...

The functioning of microbial communities in response to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (eCO2) is one of the most important, but poorly understood, contributors to climate change feedbacks. The effect of soil moisture caused by eCO2 on soil microbial communities and functioning may be of high importance in water limited ecosystems. To address t...

The leaf economics spectrum1,2 and the global spectrum of plant forms and functions³ revealed fundamental axes of variation in plant traits, which represent different ecological strategies that are shaped by the evolutionary development of plant species². Ecosystem functions depend on environmental conditions and the traits of species that comprise...

Mistletoes are important co-contributors to tree mortality globally, particularly during droughts. In Australia, mistletoe distributions are expanding in temperate woodlands, while their hosts experienced unprecedented heat and drought stress in recent years. We investigated whether the excessive water use of mistletoes increased the probability of...

Soil fauna communities are known to change during succession as the soil ages and vegetation develops. Moreover, plant functional identity (PFI) influences belowground assemblages within successional stages. Given changes in soil carbon (C) and nutrient content, this influence of PFI is likely to differ across successional stages; however, the rela...

Rising temperatures and severe drought are expected to reduce primary production under future warmer, drier climates in many regions across the globe. To sustain grassland production under more extreme climatic conditions, it is crucial to understand how plants adjust morphologically and physiologically to higher temperatures and reduced soil water...

Enhanced soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition and organic phosphorus (P) cycling may help sustain plant productivity under elevated CO 2 (eCO 2 ) and P-limiting conditions. P-acquisition by arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and their impacts on SOM decomposition may become even more relevant in these conditions. Yet, experimental evidence of the...

Soil emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas associated with agricultural systems, can be reduced by the activity of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. It is unclear, however, whether climate change may impact this ecosystem service provided by AM fungi. To assess the extent that warming may affect AM fungal mediation of N2O emiss...

Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) of wooded ecosystems (forests and savannas) is central to the global carbon cycle, comprising 67‐75% of total global terrestrial GPP. Climate change may alter this flux by increasing the frequency of temperatures beyond the thermal optimum of GPP (Topt). We examined the relationship between GPP and air temperature (...

PurposeMuch is known about growth and nutrient uptake traits and ecological stoichiometry in natural systems. However, these concepts have been comparatively understudied in agricultural systems despite their potential to infer nutrient limitation and interspecific resource competition.Methods This study established a model mixed pasture system to...

Mistletoes are emerging as important co-contributors to tree mortality across terrestrial ecosystems, particularly when infected trees are stressed by water limitations during drought. While the mechanistic effects of mistletoe infection on host physiology are reasonably well understood, quantifying the effects of mistletoe infection on stand produ...

Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (eCO 2 ) can impact soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics by changing the rates of carbon (C) losses and gains. In the rhizosphere, these changes are usually assumed to be the result of root‐mediated eCO 2 impacts on saprotrophic microbes via altered below‐ground C allocation. This C allocation can also impact mycor...

Available nutrients (TN, TC, NH4, NO3, PO4); enzymatic activity(BG, CB, XYL, NAG, LAP, PHOS, AG); root litter decomposition, mineral bound C loss and gains; moisture; PLFA microbial community data and ITS sequencing-derived arbuscular mycorrizal fungi, ectomycorrhizal fungi, saprotrophic fungi and not identified fungi proportions; for ambient and e...

Large datasets of greenhouse gas and energy surface-atmosphere fluxes measured with the eddy-covariance technique (e.g., FLUXNET2015, AmeriFlux BASE) are widely used to benchmark models and remote-sensing products. This study addresses one of the major challenges facing model-data integration: To what spatial extent do flux measurements taken at in...

The CO2 efflux from tree stem surfaces to atmosphere (RS) is an important component in the carbon (C) balance of forest ecosystems. Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations [CO2] are expected to stimulate RS, because of greater C assimilation and carbohydrate supply to stems under rising [CO2]. Growth respiration (Rg) and maintenance respir...

Understanding seasonal and diurnal dynamics of ecosystem respiration (Reco) in forests is challenging, because Reco can only be measured directly during night‐time by eddy‐covariance flux towers. Reco is the sum of soil respiration (Rsoil) and above‐ground respiration (in theory, RAG = Reco − Rsoil). Rsoil can be measured day and night and can prov...

Terrestrial ecosystems remove about 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by human activities each year¹, yet the persistence of this carbon sink depends partly on how plant biomass and soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks respond to future increases in atmospheric CO2 (refs. 2,3). Although plant biomass often increases in elevated CO2 (eCO2)...

AimsWe evaluated the impacts of altered precipitation regimes on multiple aspects of the C cycle, including C fluxes, plant and soil microbial communities, and plant-soil interactions in a south-eastern Australian grassland.Methods Our experimental treatments, operated through an automated system, included: (i) reduced and (ii) increased rainfall a...

Soil microorganisms are known to significantly contribute to climate change through soil carbon (C) cycle feedbacks. However, it is challenging to incorporate these feedbacks into predictions of future patterns of terrestrial C cycling, largely because of the vast diversity of soil microorganisms and their responses to environmental conditions. Her...

Vegetation foliage clumping significantly alters the radiation environment and affects vegetation growth as well as water, carbon cycles. The clumping index (CI) is useful in ecological and meteorological models because it provides new structural information in addition to the effective leaf area index. Previously generated CI maps using a diverse...

Wetland ecosystems are critical to the regulation of the global carbon cycle, and there is a high demand for data to improve carbon sequestration and emission models and predictions. Decomposition of plant litter is an important component of ecosystem carbon cycling, yet a lack of knowledge on decay rates in wetlands is an impediment to predicting...

p>The following authors were omitted from the original version of this Data Descriptor: Markus Reichstein and Nicolas Vuichard. Both contributed to the code development and N. Vuichard contributed to the processing of the ERA-Interim data downscaling. Furthermore, the contribution of the co-author Frank Tiedemann was re-evaluated relative to the co...

Nutrient losses due to leaching from agricultural soils can be substantial but, in some cases, soil microbes such as arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi can buffer those losses. An important knowledge gap, however, is the extent to which climate change may affect AM fungal mediation of leaching via warming and drought. To investigate this, we grew lu...

Decomposition of soil organic matter by microorganisms is a fundamental mechanism driving the terrestrial carbon (C) cycle. Microbial C use efficiency (CUE), microbial biomass residence time (MRT), and soil C temperature sensitivity (Q10) co-determine the fate of soil C in a changing climate. In order to reveal the effect of soil depth and varying...

Shifts in the timing and frequency of climate extremes, such as drought and heatwaves, can generate sustained shifts in ecosystem function with important ecological and economic impacts for rangelands and managed pastures. The Pastures and Climate Extremes experiment (PACE) in southeast Australia used a factorial combination of elevated temperature...

Globally, soils store two to three times as much carbon as currently resides in the atmosphere, and it is critical to understand how soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uptake will respond to ongoing climate change. In particular, the soil-toatmosphere CO2 flux, commonly though imprecisely termed soil respiration (RS), is one of the largest car...

The incorporation of cover crops in orchards and vineyards can increase soil organic carbon (OC) and improve nitrogen (N) availability. This study compared how three herbaceous under-vine cover crop assemblages affected OC and N pools in four edaphically distinct vineyard agroecosystems. Using physical fractionation and soil spectral analysis we: 1...

Aims Root lesion nematodes (RLN) have negative impacts on legume-grass systems. These impacts might be moderated by bacterial feeding nematodes (BFN) presence. It remains unknown how these trophic groups of nematodes interactively impact plant productivity and dynamics of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in grass-legume mixtures. We addressed this resea...

Atmospheric CO2 concentration is increasing, largely due to anthropogenic activities. Previous studies of individual free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) experimental sites have shown significant impacts of elevated CO2 (eCO2) on soil microbial communities; however, no common microbial response patterns have yet emerged, challenging our ability to predic...

This study assessed the potential application of high throughput phenotyping (HTP) to distinguish growth patterns, detect facilitation and interpret variations to shoot nutrients in mixed pasture systems in response to factorial low and high nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) application.

This study used high throughput, image-based phenotyping (HTP) to distinguish growth patterns, detect facilitation and interpret variations to nutrient uptake in a model mixed-pasture system in response to factorial low and high nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) application. HTP has not previously been used to examine pasture species in mixture. We u...

Premise: The impact of elevated CO2 concentration ([CO2 ]) and climate warming on plant productivity in dryland ecosystems is influenced strongly by soil moisture availability. We predicted that the influence of warming on the stimulation of photosynthesis by elevated [CO2 ] in prairie plants would operate primarily through direct and indirect eff...

Soil carbon and nutrient availability play crucial roles in ecosystem sustainability, and they are controlled by the interaction of climatic, biotic, and soil physico-chemical variables. Although soil physico-chemical properties have been recognized as vital variables for predicting soil organic carbon (SOC) and nutrients, their relative influence...

Significantly more carbon (C) is stored in deep soil than in shallow horizons, yet how the decomposition of deep soil organic C (SOC) will respond to rising temperature remains unexplored on large scales, leading to considerable uncertainties to predictions of the magnitude and direction of C-cycle feedbacks to climate change. Herein, short-term te...

The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their...

The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their...

Root activity may alter the temperature sensitivity (Q10) of soil respiration. However, we lack a comprehensive understanding of root effects on Q10 across different climatic regions and ecosystem types. Here, we conducted a global synthesis of 87 observations of Q10 values of soil respiration and its components from 40 published studies. We found...

Root activity may alter the temperature sensitivity (Q10) of soil respiration. However, we lack a comprehensive understanding of root effects on Q10 across different climatic regions and ecosystem types. Here, we conducted a global synthesis of 87 observations of Q10 values of soil respiration and its components from 40 published studies. We found...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) and available nitrogen (N) stocks are controlled by the complex interplay of soil physical, chemical, and biological conditions. However, the interrelations of SOC or available N with these drivers as well as their relative importance are rarely evaluated quantitatively. Using investigations of SOC density (SOCD) and avail...

Plant respiration can acclimate to changing environmental conditions and vary between species as well as biome-types, though belowground respiration responses to on-going climate warming is not well-understood. Understanding the thermal acclimation capacity of root respiration (Rroot) in relation to increasing temperatures is therefore critical in...

Atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment (eCO2) can enhance plant carbon uptake and growth1–5, thereby providing an important negative feedback to climate change by slowing the rate of increase of the atmospheric CO2 concentration6. Although evidence gathered from young aggrading forests has generally indicated a strong CO2 fertilization effect on bio...

Plain Language Summary Uniform vegetation characteristics are a core requirement for atmospheric measurements of carbon, water, and energy fluxes using monitoring stations called flux towers. The variability of ecosystem properties was commonly assumed to be negligible because no standard approach existed to quantify it. We developed a standardized...

Carbon and water fluxes are often assumed to be coupled as a result of stomatal regulation during dry conditions. However, recent observations evidenced increased transpiration rates during isolated heatwaves across a range of eucalypt species under experimental and natural conditions, with inconsistent effects on photosynthesis (ranging from incre...