Differences in maize grain yield could not be explained by soil physical properties and correlations with maize yield parameters were generally weak.
These statements are supported by the fact that the differences we found between fragments and control plots could not be explained by soil type or the relative spatial position of the plots in the landscape.
The adjective 'affiliated' should be used rather than 'specialist' since some edaphic transgressions could be explained by soil properties that could mitigate deficiencies and toxicity arising on UM substrates rather than by the substrate itself (Read et al. 2006; Ibanez et al. 2014).
Structural damage can likely be explained by soil-structure interaction, as the fundamental frequency of the soil matched that of the typical eigenfrequencies of one-, two- and three-story buildings that were mainly damaged in the epicentral area, lying in the range between 3 and 10 Hz.
Following multivariate statistical analysis, a large amount of variation in community composition was explained by soil pH, which is remarkable given the relatively small size of the sampling area and minor differences in pH.
Based on the relation between the original variables and the first canonical pair, 20% of the variance in plant properties was explained by soil attributes that did not include MS and DRS. The range values of MS (33 m) and DRS (29 to54 m) were next to those adjusted for the canonical variables of the attributes of soil (30 m) and plant (34 m).
When examining establishment using a multiple regression, 24% of the variation in pine establishment was explained by soil temperature (P = 0.01), and soil moisture explained another 14% of the variation (P = 0.003; Fig. 3; Table 3).
When examining the data using a multiple regression (Fig. 4; Table 3), 18% of the variation in sweetgum emergence and 23% of the variation in pine emergence was explained by soil temperature (P = 0.007 and P = 0.005, respectively).
Distance-based linear models revealed that 65% of the variation in mite assemblage was explained by soil properties, soil type, exposition and geographic position, while habitat age was of minor importance.
Both spatial and environmental variables structured the species, assemblages and earthworm community, although variations were found in the explained contribution of environmental factors, i.e., 33.3% of the total variation of the global spatial structure of the earthworm community was explained by soil environmental variability.
This limited solubilization ability under in situ soil conditions was also observed in other studies [27, 45, 49] and may be explained by the soil buffering capacity that inhibits the BE-induced soil acidification [33] that otherwise would have favored solubilization of calcium phosphates from soil and/or RP.
