Professor Chernova was a highly respected teacher and scientist. She was chairwoman, member of or expert in various governmental, social, educational and scientific councils, commissions, communities and foundations. Despite all of these duties, responsibilities and honorary

positions, Nina Chernova remained a readily approachable person – a human being with a genuine interest in people and events. She remembered all her students, followed their fortunes and helped where she could. Just a heart-to-heart talk with her in her small study was stimulating. In her everyday life she liked to cook, receive guests and grow flowers; she was a master at needlework. And – she liked to work, and could do so with self-abandonment, forgetting the amount of work but click here not how it should be done. I-BET-762 research buy I recall as if it

were yesterday, how the two of us, a beautiful woman of 34 and a young guy of 17, with a pair of shovels were building a multi-ton heap of cow manure for a giant decomposition experiment she had planned. It was my first field season in soil ecology and she was my first, most memorable Teacher of Science. “
“In most temperate terrestrial ecosystems, earthworms (Oligochaeta: Lumbricidae) represent the dominant fraction of the soil faunal biomass, often acting as ecosystem engineers (Jones et al. 1994) with substantial effects on the structure and fertility of soils. Most earthworm communities consist of different learn more functional groups comprising litter-dwellers (epigeics), soil-dwellers (endogeics) and vertical-burrowers (anecics; Bouché 1977). In temperate grasslands,

up to 1000 earthworms m−2 have been reported (Edwards et al. 1995). By producing huge amounts of nutrient rich casts – from 1.4–7.5 ton ha−1 a−1 (James 1991) up to 40 or even 80 ton ha−1 a−1 (reviewed in Edwards and Bohlen 1996) – such populations are a key component of nutrient cycling in soil (Lavelle, 1988 and Scheu, 1993). These earthworm casts contain more plant nutrients than bulk soil (McKenzie and Dexter, 1987, Schrader and Zhang, 1997, Zaller and Arnone, 1997 and Chaoui et al., 2002) and are also hot spots of microbial (Scheu, 1987 and Brown et al., 2000) and other invertebrate activity (Decaens et al. 1999). Moreover, earthworms are suggested to affect the diversity of grassland communities (Willems and Huijsmans, 1994, Zaller and Saxler, 2007 and Eisenhauer and Scheu, 2008) and are themselves affected by plant diversity (Zaller and Arnone, 1999a and Eisenhauer et al., 2008).