Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Many tropical forests are ...

The ability of tropical forests to grow and store carbon is limited, in part, by herbivory. Insects and other animals prefer to feed on nitrogen-fixing trees, reducing the success of fixers and the ...

Reforestation projects could be made more effective with the findings of new research into the constraints on nitrogen fixation among plants. Some trees, such as those from the Fabaceae or legume ...

Joy B. Winbourne is in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Massachusetts 01854, USA. Barker and colleagues tested whether ...

Despite decades of industrial deposition, nitrogen availability in the boreal forest is steadily declining. In a new study published in Nature, researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural ...

So, nitrogen-fixing bacteria have the added task of keeping oxygen away from the enzyme to prevent it from rusting, which requires a lot of work. In one study on a type of cyanobacteria, researchers ...

Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plant growth, but the overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture is not sustainable. A team of bacteriologists and plant scientists discuss the ...

In Death Valley National Park, which straddles the California-Nevada border, mesquite plants (genus Prosopis) thrive in extreme aridity. While most vegetation types must extract most of their ...

Bacteria are only the only organisms that are able to 'fix' nitrogen, or remove it from the atmosphere and convert it into a useful form. While some plants seem to fix nitrogen, it is actually ...

Researchers are one step closer to understanding how some plants survive without nitrogen. Their work could eventually reduce the need for artificial fertilizer in crops such as wheat, maize, or rice.