Abstract
A question often asked in ecosystem studies is: What controls rates of release of plant-available nutrients? Nutrient elements are converted from unavailable to available forms through a wide variety of transformation processes (Stevenson 1986; Schlesinger 1991); however, there are some general cycling patterns that are common to all nutrients (Fig. 14.1). For example, most plant macronutrients exist in both organic and mineral forms. Therefore, the processes of mineralization (conversion of organic to mineral forms) and assimilation (conversion of mineral to organic forms) are common to these nutrients. Other nutrients also form insoluble compounds and, thus, dissolution and precipitation processes represent important pathways for release and immobilization of plant-available forms. While procedures used to measure concentrations of different nutrients vary considerably, the approaches used to measure these transformation rates are generally quite similar.
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Stark, J.M. (2000). Nutrient Transformations. In: Sala, O.E., Jackson, R.B., Mooney, H.A., Howarth, R.W. (eds) Methods in Ecosystem Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1224-9_15
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