Table 1.
Leaf chemistry of Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) and sugar maple (Acer saccharum) collected from the Arboretum of University of Wisconsin-Madison and used in the microcosm experiment in this study.
Figure 1.
Effects of substrate quality on the soil respiration rate (SRR; a) and activities of acid phosphatase (APA; b), N-acetylglucosaminidase (NAG; c), β-d-glucosidase (GLD; d), and cellobiohydrolase (CLB; e).
Each point indicates the mean value of 4 replicates in each treatment. The smoothing lines were drawn using the “mgcv” package of R [35]. Bars indicate 95% confidence interval. Black circles, red squares, and light-blue diamonds indicate the coexisting, bacterial, and fungal communities, respectively.
Table 2.
The effects of substrate quality on microbial decomposition tested using separate additive models.
Figure 2.
The relationships between substrate-quality dissimilarity and dissimilarity of decomposition activity (a) and microbial community composition (b).
Substrate-quality dissimilarity is calculated as the difference between 2 substrates, whereas activity and community dissimilarity are calculated as the Euclidean distance between data matrices of activity and community composition, respectively. Black, red, and light-blue filled circles indicate the mean values of the coexisting, bacterial, and fungal communities, respectively. Grey circles indicate individual values. Black, red and light-blue solid lines indicate regression lines of the coexisting, bacterial, and fungal communities, respectively. Note that the points are slightly adjusted in the x-axis direction to distinguish the values of different microbial groups. Statistical results are shown in Table 3. Bars indicate standard errors of the mean.
Table 3.
Results of regression analysis between dissimilarities in decomposition activity, lipid profile and substrate quality.
Table 4.
Effects of substrate quality and microbial groups on soil decomposition activities.