There’s an interesting article published in PLOS One that I like. It’s one of these things that’s very clever, but the basic idea is very simple.

Temperatures are rising, and there’s plenty of research on how that might affect plants. In PLOS One this month Gschwendtner et al. investigate how rising temperatures affect the soil. In fact they look at the microbe community in it. Bacteria and archaea are part of the biological process of putting Nitrogen into usable form for plants. Knowing how they might react to climate change would be useful.

The experiment was very simple. At the Tuttlingen Research Station in southern Germany, Gschwendtner and her team took some beech seedlings, and the soil around them, growing on a northwest facing slope and replanted some of them on a southwest facing slope. They got more sunlight on the soil and so you effectively change the climate for those soil samples. Compare one with the other and you get to see what sort of changes warmer weather might have.