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Ecological Processes
Fig. 1 | Ecological Processes

Fig. 1

From: Enhanced carbon acquisition and use efficiency alleviate microbial carbon relative to nitrogen limitation under soil acidification

Fig. 1

Conceptual diagram illustrating relative microbial element limitation and their adaptive strategies to imbalanced supply of resources relative to requirements. Microbial communities tend to increase acquisition and use efficiency of the scarcest element to cope with imbalanced element supply and requirements. The transition from nutrient limitation to energy (C) limitation corresponds to the threshold element ratio (TER), which links EST and metabolic theory of ecology (MTE). It is important to emphasize that the TERC:N is not a constant, especially for non-homeostatic communities, but is sub-linearly correlated with biomass C:N (Sinsabaugh et al. 2013)

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