plant litter

ENVO:01000628 ·resolve ·TERRESTRIAL ·EXACT REVIEWED

Leaf litter is dead plant material, such as leaves, bark, needles, and twigs, that has fallen to the ground. — ENVO

Source attestations

Each upstream vocabulary's own account of this habitat. Assertion counts are per-source units and are not comparable across sources — GOLD counts organisms, BacDive strains, PREGO taxa.

What each upstream vocabulary says about this habitat
Source	Label / path	Assertions	Unit
BACDIVE	Decomposing-plant	625	STRAIN
ENVIRONMENTS_TABLE	litter Physicochemical parameter bands from kg-microbe's environment table.	—
GOLD	Environmental > Terrestrial > Plant litter 3 GOLD ecosystem node ids share this path; first shown. See data/raw/gold_ecosystem_paths.tsv.	55	ORGANISM
GOLD	Environmental > Terrestrial > Plant litter > Litterfall	—
MADIN	plant litter	19	TAXON

Broader habitats

terrestrial biome ENVO:00000446
organic material ENVO:01000155
anatomical entity UBERON:0001062

Environmental parameters

Physicochemical parameters
Parameter	Value	Source
GRADIENTS	high	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
NUTRIENTS	medium	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
ORGANIC_MATTER	high	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
PRESSURE	low	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
SALINITY	low	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
SALINITY_VARIABILITY	small	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
STRUCTURAL_COMPLEXITY	h	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
TEMPERATURE	medium	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
TEMPERATURE_VARIABILITY	medium	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)
WATER_VARIABILITY	occasionally wet	kg-microbe environments.csv (litter)

Associated taxa

Taxa reported from this habitat, which is weaker than being characteristic of it. rank is out of pool: a high rank in a pool of thousands of near-tied scores is a weak claim. Entries corroborated by a second, independent source are listed first.

Taxa reported from this habitat
Taxon	Source	Rank	Pool
Corallococcus coralloides `NCBITaxon:184914`	BACDIVE	1	126
Sorangium cellulosum `NCBITaxon:56`	BACDIVE	2	126
Nannocystis exedens `NCBITaxon:54`	BACDIVE	3	126
Myxococcus fulvus `NCBITaxon:33`	BACDIVE	4	126
Herpetosiphon sp. `NCBITaxon:71864`	BACDIVE	5	126
Archangium sp. `NCBITaxon:1872627`	BACDIVE	6	126
Melittangium lichenicola `NCBITaxon:45`	BACDIVE	7	126
Bacteria `NCBITaxon:2`	BACDIVE	8	126
Cystobacter armeniaca `NCBITaxon:394090`	BACDIVE	9	126
Hyalangium gracile `NCBITaxon:394092`	BACDIVE	10	126
Myxococcus virescens `NCBITaxon:83456`	BACDIVE	11	126
Corallococcus exiguus `NCBITaxon:83462`	BACDIVE	12	126
Hyalangium minutum `NCBITaxon:394096`	BACDIVE	13	126
Sporocytophaga myxococcoides `NCBITaxon:153721`	BACDIVE	14	126
Myxococcales `NCBITaxon:29`	BACDIVE	15	126
Myxococcus stipitatus `NCBITaxon:83455`	BACDIVE	16	126
Allostigmatella erecta `NCBITaxon:83460`	BACDIVE	17	126
Myxococcus xanthus `NCBITaxon:34`	BACDIVE	18	126
Pseudomonas sp. `NCBITaxon:306`	BACDIVE	19	126
Archangium disciforme `NCBITaxon:38`	BACDIVE	20	126
Pectobacterium carotovorum `NCBITaxon:554`	BACDIVE	21	126
`NCBITaxon:57`	BACDIVE	22	126
Archangium violaceum `NCBITaxon:83451`	BACDIVE	23	126
Polyangium sorediatum `NCBITaxon:889274`	BACDIVE	24	126
Archangiaceae `NCBITaxon:39`	BACDIVE	25	126

Showing 25 of 44 kept associations.

Also called

Decomposing-plant — BacDive
Litterfall — GOLD
duff — ENVO
leaf litter — ENVO
litterfall — ENVO
soil litter — ENVO
tree litter — ENVO

Curation

What a curator decided about this record, and why. A record built from several source concepts can carry one decision per concept.

GROUND 2026-08-16 · claude-opus-5
Grounded to ENVO:01000628 'plant litter' (CLOSE). Term-request re-check (#12): 'Decomposing-plant' was left ungrounded after NCIT:C14258 'Plant' was refused for naming the organism rather than the decomposing material. That refusal was right; the conclusion that no term fits was not. ENVO:01000628 'plant litter' is dead plant material — leaves, bark, needles, twigs — which is what the bin holds. CLOSE rather than EXACT because ENVO's definition adds 'that has fallen to the ground', and standing dead plant material is decomposing plant that is not litter. (source concept habitatmech:BACDIVE.5d6bbfabf0)
REVIEW 2026-08-16 · claude-opus-5
Reviewed and endorsed the seeder's own resolution. Risky-grounding review (#12): the flag is lexical: the term's label spells out a qualifier that the GOLD path supplies positionally rather than in the leaf. The path pins the sense, and it is the term's. (source concept habitatmech:GOLD.0d89d93335)
REVIEW 2026-08-16 · claude-opus-5
Reviewed and endorsed the seeder's own resolution. Risky-grounding review (#12), co-attestor pass: this source concept feeds a record whose grounding was flagged and reviewed, and the record could not reach REVIEWED until every source feeding it was decided. The GOLD path's leaf is the term's label and the path's parent steps agree with the term's sense, so the seeder's resolution is endorsed. (source concept habitatmech:GOLD.e797d3ba16)
REVIEW 2026-08-16 · claude-opus-5
Reviewed and endorsed the seeder's own resolution. Risky-grounding review (#12), co-attestor pass: this source concept feeds a record whose grounding was flagged and reviewed, and the record could not reach REVIEWED until every source feeding it was decided. This one is a self-grounding: the source vocabulary names the concept with the ontology term's own label, so there is nothing to adjudicate between the two — checked that the term is the one the label denotes, and that the record it merges into is the same concept rather than a homonym. (source concept habitatmech:MADIN.c7c13007c1)

Provenance

Generated by scripts/seed_from_sources.py from the committed inventories in data/raw/. View the record.