More than 90 million critters living in each teaspoon of soil. As they ate the leaves, they made smaller and smaller bits of litter. As they consumed the litter, and one another, they excreted excess nitrogen into the soil pores, making a nutritious soup of nitrogen compounds accessible to the pine roots. But in this decomposition and mineralization process, faster-growing plants like grasses could grab the inorganic nitrogen before the pines, and this didn’t square with the great amount that ended up in the needles of the pines growing alongside the alders and grasses. One particularly
...more
