Sentences with phrase «of leaf litter»

In this activity, you will be able to see the biodiversity levels of leaf litter in your neighborhood and how human activity has impacted these levels.

The accumulation of leaf litter in a dry climate sets the stage for periodic fires.

A statistical analysis of the weight loss of each leaf litter sample after those nine months showed that higher background radiation was associated with less weight loss.

Have you ever turned over a rock or lifted a pile of leaf litter to find some interesting critters?

She's been itching to return to the Fyles Leaf Bed, where the charcoal - black layers of leaf litter represent annual cycles spanning thousands of years.

When it comes to encouraging one to set up home in your garden, be sure to keep areas wild, with copious amounts of leaf litter and a few logs, or treat your spiky visitors to a hedgehog house.

Lots of rain, however, had no effect on the rate of leaf litter decomposition, perhaps because the fungi are not overly stressed and actually thrive when springtails munch on them a bit, the researchers speculate.

He said: «We've established that earthworms, referred to as «nature's ploughs» by Charles Darwin, have a metabolic coping mechanism to deal with a range of leaf litter diets.

• Once you've found a suitable patch of leaf litter, measure out an area of one meter squared using the meter stick.

So we ended up just grabbing a whole handful of leaf litter and throwing it into a plastic bag.»

New York's architecture isn't as flammable as San Francisco's clapboard Victorians, but within 200 years, says Steven Clemants, vice president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, tons of leaf litter would overflow gutters as pioneer weeds gave way to colonizing native oaks and maples in city parks.

That lone saucer - headed ant, picked out of leaf litter in Kenya, looked so different from its normal nest mates that it was wrongly assigned its own species.

Even the European earthworms are damaging the forest there, converting every bit of leaf litter and duff into nice, soluble worm castings — that wash away.

What keeps soils alive, and productive, is the compost or humus of leaf litter, animal dung, withered roots and other decaying vegetation in the first metre or so of topsoil: this in turn feeds an invisible army of tiny creatures that recycle the nutrient elements for the next generation of plant life.

The study found that different kinds of leaf litter in standing water influences where these mosquitoes decide to lay their eggs and whether or not the hatchlings thrive or flounder.

According to Peter Groffman, a microbial ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., northern hardwood forests have relied on thick layers of leaf litter that serve as a rooting medium.

«And we could see the difference they made in the physical structure of the soil and the amount of leaf litter.»

The researchers suggest the cause may be a change to a warmer, wetter climate, which reduces tree growth and may lead to a thinner layer of leaf litter, where the animals live.

Cacao plantations (which produce cocoa) produce a heavier layer of this leaf litter.

Before worms invade, the soil in a typical northern forest is blanketed by a thick layer of leaf litter and other organic material.