Hermann F. Jungkunst

• Yeti of Geoecology & Physical Geography
• iES Landau

An important control on long-term soil organic carbon (SOC) storage is the adsorption of SOC by short-range-ordered (SRO) minerals. SRO are commonly quantified by measuring oxalate-extractable metals (Mox = Alox + ½ Feox), which many studies have shown to be positively correlated with SOC. It remains uncertain if this organo-mineral relationship is...

Early warning signs in the Amazon: Tipping elements are not tipping points Unveiling the relationship between society and the environment, a new research project sheds light on “tipping points” – critical thresholds beyond which change becomes abrupt and potentially irreversible. In its simplest terms, a system is a network of interconnected elemen...

Synthetic hydrophilic polymers are an emerging yet overlooked class of anthropogenic substances. Unlike particulate plastics, synthetic hydrophilic polymers can interact with water, which complicates studying their fate and effects in the environment. This review discusses the sources, fate, and effects of these polymers across ecosystem boundaries...

Gas exchange in the soil is determined by the size and connectivity of air‐filled pores. Root mucilage reduces air‐filled pore connectivity and thus gas diffusivity. It is unclear to what extent mucilage affects soil pore connectivity and tortuosity. The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of gas diffusion processes in the rhizosph...

Permaculture is a promising framework to design and manage sustainable food production systems. However, there is still a lack of scientific evidence especially on the crop productivity of permaculture systems. In this first study on permaculture yield, we collected yield data of eleven permaculture sites, that work according to organic guidelines,...

Permaculture is proposed as a tool to design and manage agroecological systems in response to the pressing environmental challenges of soil degradation, climate change and biodiversity loss. However, scientific evidence on the effects of permaculture is still scarce. In this comprehensive study on a wide range of soil and biodiversity indicators, w...

Despite knowing better, water‐stable aggregates like pseudosands are still disintegrated into their clay‐ and silt‐sized bits and pieces to serve standardization in texture determination. Lacking yet a viable alternative, this deliberately committed mistake seems the contemporary best practice for modeling purposes, which is far from being ideal. H...

1) Left picture: Limited rewetting capacity of peatlands; The fen "Körziner Wiesen is shown between the lake Blankensee and the village Körzin 20 km south of Berlin. 2) Top right picture: Soil profile after deep plowing on a short rotation plantation in the catchment "Fuhrberger Feld" north of Hannover. 3) Bottom right picture: Soil profile of a...

Humans play an interconnecting role in social-ecological systems (SES), they are part of these systems and act as agents of their destruction and regulation. This study aims to provide an analytical framework, which combines the concept of SES with the concept of tipping dynamics. As a result, we propose an analytical framework describing relevant...

Understanding the development of white sands ecosystems (WSEs) and their occurrence is critical for determining structural diversity in global biodiversity hotspots. WSE has fascinated ecologists for decades, with soil always opined to play a critical role in the development of complex ecosystem vegetation patterns. However, few to no studies have...

Soils contain significantly more carbon than the atmosphere, hence we should understand how best to stabilize it. Unfortunately, the role of human interventions on soil organic carbon (SOC) persistence in the Anthropocene remains vague, lacking adequate sites that allow unbiased direct comparisons of pristine and human influenced soils. Here we pre...

SystemLink is an interdisciplinary research training group funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) involving multiple cohorts of international doctoral researchers closely cooperating at the iES Landau, Institute for Environmental Sciences, Germany. The goal of SystemLink is to investigate how anthropogenic stressors on aquatic ecosystems af...

Background The invasive plant species Fallopia japonica is suspected to use polyphenols as a novel weapon to inhibit nitrification in soil. Both specific polyphenols and their entry pathways are yet to be determined. As plants may increase the production of polyphenols under copper (Cu) stress, an additive effect can be expected in contaminated (ri...

Only targeted and sustainable management will preserve extensively managed grasslands, one of Europe’s most species rich habitats. Traditional, largely abandoned irrigation might prove a sustainable management strategy, but the understanding of the interactions between irrigation, soil properties and plant species is low for a generally humid ecore...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) holds the largest terrestrial carbon stock because of soil conditions and processes that favor soil carbon persistence. Vulnerable to climate change, SOC may cross a tipping point toward liberating carbon‐based greenhouse gases, implying massive self‐amplifying SOC‐ climate interactions. Estimates of SOC persistence are ch...

Wetlands play a much greater role in the global carbon cycle than their area share would suggest. Plant biomass production and restricted decomposition due to continuous soil water saturation make them important atmospheric carbon sinks. This fragile stage can quickly tip towards being atmospheric sources by droughts and drainages. Therefore, they...

Root-specific and leaf-specific biomarkers have been used for decades to identify the origin of organic materials in soils and sediments. However, quantitative approaches require appropriate knowledge about the fate of these indicator molecules during degradation. To clarify this issue, we performed a 1-year incubation experiment with fine root and...

Phosphate fertilization contributes to an input of uranium (U) in agricultural soils. Although its accumulation and fate in agricultural soils have been previously studied, its colloidal transport and accumulation along slopes through erosion have been studied to a lesser extent in viticulture soils. To bridge this gap, the contents and potential m...

Litter decomposition is a key process for carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and is mainly controlled by environmental conditions, substrate quantity, and quality as well as microbial community abundance and composition. In particular, the effects of climate and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition on litter decomposition and its...

Background: Gaseous matter exchanges in soil are determined by the connectivity of the pore system which is easily clogged by fresh root exudates. However, it remains unclear how a hydrogel (e.g., mucilage) affects soil pore tortuosity and gas diffusion properties when drying. Aims: The aim of this viewpoint study is to extend the understanding of...

Growing evidence suggests that climate classification facilitates the identification of zones that either agree or disagree with processes explaining soil organic carbon (SOC) persistence. Already forty years ago, Post et al. (1982) posited that the strict temperature and precipitation-based classification defining the Holdridge Life Zones (HLZ) pr...

Growing evidence suggests that climate classification facilitates the identification of zones that either agree or disagree with processes explaining soil organic carbon (SOC) persistence. Already forty years ago, Post et al. (1982) posited that the strict temperature and precipitation‐based classification defining the Holdridge Life Zones (HLZ) pr...

SAP 21608 Data do envio: 24/01/2019 Data do aceite: 31/03/2019 Sci. Agrar. Parana., Marechal Cândido Rondon, v. 18, n. 3, jul./set., p. 218-225, 2019 RESUMO-As alterações de uso e manejo do solo têm-se tornado pauta também, em ambientes de discussão sobre alterações do clima, sido apontada como causa dessas mudanças. Diante do exposto, objetivou-se...

• New plant functions in the exchange of greenhouse gases between ecosystems and atmosphere have recently been discovered. We tested whether photosynthetic activity has an effect on N2O emission rates from incubated plant–soil systems. • Two laboratory experiments were performed. One to unravel possible effect of photosynthetic activity on the net...

As alterações de uso e manejo do solo têm-se tornado pauta também, em ambientes de discussão sobre alterações do clima, sido apontada como causa dessas mudanças. Diante do exposto, objetivou-se com o presente trabalho avaliar se a adição do glifosato influencia o efluxo de dióxido de carbono (CO2) e metano (CH4) em manejos de solos. Amostras de 500...

A global estimate of C sequestration

Within the chapter we review the knowledge and scientific gaps on how plant invaders influence soil carbon. We conclude • Invasive plants influence soil carbon storage and cycling but not in a unidirectional manner. • Differing effects depend on the specific invasive species, suppressed native vegetation type, soil characteristics, and hydrological...

When one looks at the global distribution of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks, a few patterns emerge (Figure 3.1). The SOC density is not uniformly distributed and nitrogen (N) is strongly associated with it. Hot spots of SOC density exist primarily in the northern higher latitudes and again in smaller pockets in the equatorial regions. But even th...

Long-term environmental research networks are one approach to advancing local, regional, and global environmental science and education. A remarkable number and wide variety of environmental research networks operate around the world today. These are diverse in funding, infrastructure, motivating questions, scientific strengths, and the sciences th...

Spatial or temporal forest–peatland transition zones were proposed as potential hot spots of methane (CH4) emissions. Consequently, paludified soils are an important component of boreal landscape biogeochemistry. However, their role in the regional carbon cycle remains unclear. This study presents CH4 fluxes from two forest–peatland transition zone...

Through litter decomposition enormous amounts of carbon is emitted to the atmosphere. Numerous large-scale decomposition experiments have been conducted focusing on this fundamental soil process in order to understand the controls on the terrestrial carbon transfer to the atmosphere. However, previous studies were mostly based on site-specific litt...

Studies on the impacts of land-use and land-cover change on stream hydrochemistry in active deforestation zones of the Amazon agricultural frontier are limited and have often used low-temporal-resolution datasets. Moreover, these impacts are not concurrently assessed in well-established agricultural areas and new deforestations hotspots. We aimed t...

Through litter decomposition enormous amount of carbon is emitted to the atmosphere. Numerous large-scale decomposition experiments have been conducted focusing on this fundamental soil process in order to understand the controls on the terrestrial carbon transfer to the atmosphere. However, previous studies were mostly based on site-specific litte...

Through litter decomposition enormous amounts of carbon is emitted to the atmosphere. Numerous large-scale decomposition experiments have been conducted focusing on this fundamental soil process in order to under-stand the controls on the terrestrial carbon transfer to the atmosphere. However, previous studies were mostly based on site-specific litt...

Studies on the impacts of land-use and land-cover change on stream hydrochemistry in active deforestation zones of the Amazon agricultural frontier are limited and have often used low-temporalresolution datasets. We aimed to identify these impacts using an experimental setup to collect high-temporal-resolution hydrological and hydrochemical data in...

The calculation of robust estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions due to agriculture is essential to support the framing of the Brazilian climate change mitigation policy. Information on the future development of land use and land cover change (LULCC) under the combination of various driving factors operating at different spatial scale levels,...

This article describes the design of a new model-based assessment framework to identify and analyse possible future trajectories of agricultural development and their environmental consequences within the states of Mato Grosso and Pará in Southern Amazonia, Brazil. The objective is to provide a tool for improving the information basis for scientist...

The superlative environmental conditions in Southern Amazonia, i.e. high temperatures and annual rainfall, create ideal conditions for high soil organic matter turnover rates and therewith the soil-atmosphere exchanges of greenhouse gases. In this study, we present daily observations of soil-related carbon dioxide (Co2), nitrous oxide (N2O), and me...

What would current ecosystems be like without the impact of mankind? This question, which is critical for ecosystem management, has long remained unanswered due to a lack of present-day data from truly undisturbed ecosystems. Using mountaineering techniques, we accessed pristine relict ecosystems in the Peruvian Andes to provide this baseline data...

Climate projections propose that drought stress will become challenging for establishing trees. The magnitude of stress is dependent on tree species, provenance, and most likely also highly influenced by soil quality. European Beech (Fagus sylvatica) is of major ecological and economical importance in Central European forests. The species has an es...

Process-oriented models have become important tools in terms of quantification of environmental changes, for filling measurement gaps, and building of future scenarios. It is especially important to couple model application directly with measurements for remote areas, such as Southern Amazonia, where direct measurements are difficult to perform con...

Managing ecosystems for carbon storage may also benefit biodiversity conservation, but such a potential 'win-win' scenario has not yet been assessed for tropical agroforestry landscapes. We measured above-and below-ground carbon stocks as well as the species richness of four groups of plants and eight of animals on 14 representative plots in Sulawe...

Brazil typifies the land use changes happening in South America, where natural vegetation is continuously converted into agriculturally used lands, such as cattle pastures and croplands. Such changes in land use are always associated with changes in the soil nutrient cycles and result in altered greenhouse gas fluxes from the soil to the atmosphere...

About 60% of the European wetlands are located in the European part of Russia. Nevertheless, data on methane emissions from wetlands of that area are absent. Here we present results of methane emission measurements for two climatically different years from a boreal peatland complex in European Russia. Winter fluxes were well within the range of wha...

Bark pH is an essential parameter which partly governs the chemistry of the bark as well as its suitability as a microhabitat to a wide range of epiphytic organisms. Bark pH is known to vary with tree species, epiphytic cover, stemflow channelization, and anthropogenic influences. To date, reliable methods to quantify the spatial and temporal dimen...

It is an indisputable fact that human activities are affecting properties and development of ecosystems to such a degree that it is, nowadays, almost impossible to get baseline values from undisturbed ecosystems. This baseline data is crucial for settling preconceived ideas of what is ‘natural’, whilst providing information on the extent of human i...

Human activity affects properties and development of ecosystems across the globe to such a degree that it is challenging to get baseline values for undisturbed ecosystems. This is especially true for soils, which are affected by land-use history and hold a legacy of past human interventions. Therefore, it is still largely unknown how soil would hav...

Earthworms (EWs) and mycorrhizal fungi are key components of soil biota participating in N recycling from leaf litter. The extent to which their interactions impact leaf litter-derived N uptake by tree species colonized by different mycorrhizal types and the variation of these interactions with leaf litter quality is unknown. We used a greenhouse e...

Als Folge des Klimawandels steigt vielerorts die Gefahr der Bodenerosion, insbesondere auf brachliegenden Ackerflächen. Dies resultiert v.a. aus höheren winterlichen Niederschlagssummen sowie aus einer Zunahme sommerlicher Starkniederschlagsereignisse auf ausgetrocknete Böden. Jugendliche erforschen im Gelände, Labor und Experiment/Modell das Ausma...

Human activity affects properties and development of ecosystems across the globe to such a degree that it is challenging to get baseline values for undisturbed ecosystems. This is especially true for soils, which are affected by land-use history and hold a legacy of past human interventions. Therefore, it is still largely unknown how soil would hav...

TThe process based soil loss model EROSION 2D is used for simulation of soil erosion, sediment transport and deposition on sloped cropland in Campo Verde region of Mato Grosso. Since contour banks and no-till measures are well established tools in local agricultural management, the study targets on estimating protection potential of both measures....

Human activity affects properties and development of ecosystems across the globe, to such a degree that it is nowadays challenging to get baseline values for undisturbed ecosystems. This is especially true for soil development, which is potentially affected by land-use history and holds a legacy of past human interventions. Therefore, it is still l...

Human activities affected ecosystems worldwide to such an extent that there is even discussion that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Although numerous studies quantified human impact on varies ecosystem processes and properties, the natural state of many ecosystems and their soils remains unknown. Moreover, human influence...

• Context Old-growth forests with natural forest development and complex stand structure have become extremely rare in Central Europe. Changes of biogeochemistry and the N cycle across a full forest development cycle are not well understood. • Aims We tested the hypothesis that net N mineralization and the relative importance of nitrification are i...

Nitrous oxide (N 2 O) is a potent greenhouse gas, which has to be included in national inventories because it is contributing to global warming. It primarily originates from agriculturally managed soils. These represent area sources, which are much more difficult to account for than point sources, such as power plants or industrial sources. The Int...

Forest soils contribute ca. 70 % to the global soil organic carbon (SOC) pool and thus are an important element of the global carbon cycle. Forests also harbour a large part of the global terrestrial biodiversity. It is not clear, however, whether tree species diversity affects SOC. By measuring the carbon concentration of different soil particle s...

A video abstract is available for download at: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/1/014007/

Wetland soils are an important pool in the global carbon cycle. The greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide exchange between the atmosphere and wetland soils and are highly controlled by the water table. We performed a soil incubation experiment with four different soils from the Drakensberg, South Africa. Under same conditions i...

National Geographic Magazine- Germany. “Botanik - Aufstieg in eine vergessene Welt” (December 2013 issue)

The global importance of wetlands in the carbon and nitrogen cycle are well documented, but the specific characteristics of South African wetlands are less known. The global importance of wetlands in the carbon and nitrogen cycles are well documented, but the specific greenhouse gas characteristics of South African wetlands are less well known. The...

Through their leaf litter and throughfall water, tree species can have a pronounced influence on soil chemistry. However, there is little knowledge of species-specific root effects on greenhouse gas fluxes between forest soils and the atmosphere. By growing saplings of beech (Fagus sylvatica) and ash (Fraxinus excelsior) in monoculture or mixture a...

Purpose The best method for determining soil organic carbon (SOC) in carbonate-containing samples is still open to debate. The objective of this work was to evaluate a thermal gradient method (ThG), which can determine simultaneously inorganic carbon (SIC) and SOC in a wide range of soil samples. Materials and methods The determination of SOC by Th...

a b s t r a c t Previous research has shown that N 2 O emissions from forest soils can vary considerably with forest type. It is not yet known whether these variations are mainly reflecting differences between needle-leaved and broad-leaved forests or if there are also flux differences among different broad-leaved tree species. Furthermore, it rema...

Nitrous oxide emissions are of critical importance for the assumed climate neutrality of bio-energy. In this study we report on the N 2 O fluxes from a bio-energy poplar plantation measured with eddy covariance for 2 years, after conversion of agricultural fields to few months after harvesting of the plantation. A pulse peak of N 2 O was detected a...

Managing ecosystems for carbon storage may also benefit biodiversity conservation, but such a potential 'win-win' scenario has not yet been assessed for tropical agroforestry landscapes. We measured above- and below-ground carbon stocks as well as the species richness of four groups of plants and eight of animals on 14 representative plots in Sulaw...

Species richness in the study plots in relation to below-ground carbon stocks. Species richness of 12 groups of organisms in relation to below-ground (soil + root) carbon stocks in 14 plots of natural forest and cacao agroforests. Symbols as in Fig. S1. (TIF)

Species richness in the study plots in relation to above-ground carbon stocks. Species richness of 12 groups of organisms in relation to above-ground carbon stocks in 14 plots of natural forest and cacao agroforests. Symbols as in Fig. S1. (TIF)

Species richness of selected organisms in relation to total carbon stocks in the 14 plots. Species richness (number of species per plot) of 12 groups of organisms in relation to total carbon stocks in 14 plots of natural forest and cacao agroforests. Large black circles denote natural forest plots, small circles agroforests of varying tree density...

Nitrous oxide (N 2 O) is a high-impact greenhouse gas. Due to the scarcity of unmanaged forests in Central Europe, its long-term natural background emission level is not entirely clear. We mea-sured soil N 2 O emissions in an unmanaged, old-growth beech forest in the Hainich National Park, Germany, at 15 plots over a 1-year period. The average annu...

In the light of global change, the necessity to monitor atmospheric depositions that have relevant effects on ecosystems is ever increasing particularly for tropical sites. For this study, atmospheric ionic depositions were measured on tropical Central Sulawesi at remote sites with both a conventional bulk water collector system (BWS collector) and...

Upland soils are the most important terrestrial sink for the greenhouse gas CH4. The oxidation of CH4 is highly influenced by reactive N which is increasingly added to many ecosystems by atmospheric deposition and thereby also alters the labile C pool in the soils. The interacting effects of soil N availability and the labile C pool on CH4 oxidatio...

Since the pre-industrial era atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased considerably. Wetlands, as a source of atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide, play an important role in the global carbon and nitrogen cycle. Due to their slow decomposition rate of organic matter under anaerobic conditions, wetlands store significant quantit...

a b s t r a c t Windthrows are among the most important disturbances of forest ecosystems in Europe, with expected increasing frequency due to climate change. However, surprisingly little is known about soil carbon dynamics after windthrow mainly due to missing field assessments. After a large windthrow event in the High Tatra Mountains in 2004 thr...

a b s t r a c t Forests and wetlands are generally seen as opposites in the methane cycle of terrestrial ecosystems. Wetlands are sources for atmospheric methane and forest soils sinks. However, this greenhouse gas is also emitted by wet forest soils, which is commonly disregarded due to lacking information on their spatial distribution. Here, we e...

Climate change is evident and increases of carbon dioxide concentration (CO2), temperature and extreme weather events are predicted. To predict the effects of such changes on carbon (C) cycling, the processes and mechanisms determining the magnitude of C storage and fluxes must be well understood. The biggest challenge is nowadays to quantify below...