Acacia longifolia, which is native to Australia, is a species which was cultivated in Portugal primarily to stabilize dunes and as an ornamental plant; now it has spread out uncontrollably in Portugal and into many ecosystems around the world. This has varying effects on native species. Because of a symbiosis with bacteria at its roots, Acacia longifolia can use atmospheric nitrogen from the air; it also grows fast and produces a lot of biomass. This means it adds nitrogen to the otherwise low-nutrient dune ecosystem, giving it unintended fertilizer. The acacia also uses more water than the native species. A team of researchers headed by the ecologists Professor Christiane Werner and Christine Hellmann, in collaboration with scientists at the Universities of M\u00fcnster and Hamburg, has worked out a new approach to determine the extent to which the physical surroundings influence the acacia’s interaction with other plants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Acacia longifolia, which is native to Australia, is a species which was cultivated in Portugal primarily to stabilize dunes and as an ornamental plant; now it has spread out uncontrollably in Portugal and into many ecosystems around the world. This has varying effects on native species. Because of a symbiosis with bacteria at its roots, Acacia longifolia can use atmospheric nitrogen from the air; it also grows fast and produces a lot of biomass. This means it adds nitrogen to the otherwise low-nutrient dune ecosystem, giving it unintended fertilizer. The acacia also uses more water than the native species. A team of researchers headed by the ecologists Professor Christiane Werner and Christine Hellmann, in collaboration with scientists at the Universities of Münster and Hamburg, has worked out a new approach to determine the extent to which the physical surroundings influence the acacia’s interaction with other plants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=334958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334959,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334958\/revisions\/334959"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=334958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=334958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=334958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}