Sentences with phrase «of dead plant matter»

In nature, these fungi serve as a catalyst — speeding decomposition and ridding the planet of megatons of dead plant matter.

It remains unclear whether tropical forests, such as those of the Amazon or Congo, produce the same effect, due to much faster decomposition of dead plant matter in these climes.

Laborious research in the 1960s by the late pioneering U.S. ecologist Eugene Odum seemed to indicate that forests achieve a balance between the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbed by growing trees and plants and the amount of CO2 released back into the atmosphere by the decomposition of dead plant matter.

Not exact matches

Insects bind together nearly every ecosystem by pollinating 80 percent of food plants and recycling dead organic matter.

Fungi are the primary decomposers of dead plant and animal matter in many ecosystems, and are commonly seen on old bread as mold.

Everyone knows fossil fuels come from long - dead plants, but Jeffrey Dukes wanted real numbers: How much plant matter does it take to make a gallon of gasoline?

The findings, published online this week in the journal Ecology, show that the type of plants growing on the surface of our peaty moorlands can change how quickly dead plant material is broken down, influencing the speed with which carbon from dead plant matter is released back into the air we breathe.

According to her, the research included four of the five functionally distinct carbon pools whose study is recommended by the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): aboveground biomass (live plants), dead organic matter, leaf litter (layer that contains a combination of fragments of leaves, branches and other decomposing organic matter) and soil (up to 30 centimeters (cm) in depth).

It's hard to ignore the subject as more research around the benefits of plant - based diets is released — and as more documentaries like What the Health, Food Matters, Forks Over Knives and Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead are added to Netflix.

In 19 zany poems, including rhyme, free verse, sonnet, tanka, and clerihew, Bulion introduces a variety of the brown food web's decomposers that live in the leaf litter layer, also called the duff, and how they turn dead organic matter into nutrients for plants.

I have opened up canister filters to find live juvenile fish, gravel, plant matter, fragments of filter material and, of course, bits and pieces of dead fish.

The metabolic processes that are responsible for plant growth and maintenance and the microbial turnover, which is associated with dead organic matter decomposition, control the cycle of carbon, nutrients, and water through plants and soil on both rapid and intermediate time - scales.

«A potentially very large Arctic source of methane to the atmosphere is the decay of organic matter in the form of dead plant, animal and microbial remains that have been frozen in shallow permafrost for tens of thousands of years,» it said.

Simply speaking, volcanoes helped form the atmosphere while living organisms have helped shape the atmosphere to their liking in two ways: firstly by warming the planet to a liveable temperature by producing methane and carbon dioxide during the process of decay of dead matter, and secondly by creating oxygen through the process of photosynthesis by our green friends in the plant kingdom.