Journal of Ecology

Single-trait indices of functional composition best linked variation in environmental gradients with the ecosystem services (ESs) productivity, soil carbon and their combined levels. Because the environment-trait-functioning relationships were independent of one another, the ESs were independently distributed across the landscape, providing little evidence of synergies or trade-offs. While single-trait indices were superior in this study, both single- and multi-trait indices contained unique information about functional composition of these communities, and both are likely to have a place in predicting variation in ESs under different scenarios.

All three major components of plant functional diversity contributed to explaining patterns of carbon storage in the Chaco forest of Argentina. What matters the most for carbon storage is the relative abundance of plants with tall and dense stems, with a narrow range of variation around these values. No consistent link was found between carbon storage and the leaf traits usually associated with plant resource-use strategy.

We showed that community-weighted mean trait values (CWM) and different functional diversity (FD) metrics cannot be considered independent of each other and that the relationship between them greatly depends on the trait values of the species considered. We present the first framework to assist planning experiments specially designed to decouple the effects of CWM and FD on ecosystem processes.

Ecosystem services in arable systems are often delivered by invertebrate consumers. The traits based approach to quantifying the trade-offs and synergies between multiple services was applied to these systems by modelling functional relationships across trophic levels. The approach has the potential to be used to audit the value of different plant habitats in terms of ecosystem service delivery on farmland.

Grassland production, C sequestration and soil N retention are jointly related to plant and microbial functional traits. Managing grasslands for selected, or multiple, ecosystem services will thus require a consideration of the joint effects of plant and soil communities. Further understanding of the mechanisms that link plant and microbial functional traits is essential to achieve this.

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The presence of predatory ants frequently deters pollinators from visiting flowers. Many flowers secrete ant-repellent substances to counteract this negative effect. In this study, however, we found that the weaver ant host plant, Melastoma malabathricum, encourages ants to patrol their flowers. Ants deter less effective pollinators and attract the most effective pollinators, Xylocopa bees, through an indirect effect on resource depletion.

Our results indicate that both grazing and elevated CO₂ are mitigating the effects of dry spells on alpine vegetation. The net effect of the continuous decline in land use and of elevated CO₂ is negative for catchment water yield and thus, for potential hydroelectric power production. Although these economic ‘costs’ are rather moderate per hectare of alpine grassland, sums are substantial when scaled to the vast areas potentially affected in the Alps. These calculated ‘costs’ attribute economic value to the eco-hydrological benefits of land care at these high elevations.

We demonstrate that a shrub can function simultaneously as both a seed trap and a barrier to herbaceous seed flow, with the exact balance determined by location within the shrub patch. Furthermore, whether the effect of the shrub on herbaceous seeds is regarded as facilitatory or competitive is scale-dependent. A mechanistic dissociation of seed dispersal from other processes modulated by the shrub in shaping the herbaceous community is important for understanding the resilience of semiarid and arid ecosystems to environmental changes.

Herbivores and granivores highly modulate plant abundance and population dynamics. Our results stress the importance of considering these combined effects on several life stages of plants' life cycle. In practice, future reintroduction attempts of Medicago citrina on Cabrera Island should consider measures to either control the populations of rats and rabbits or mitigate their impacts on the earlier recruitment stages of the plant.

As the process by which invasive plants successfully invade ecosystems in their non-native range is probably multifactorial in most cases, examining several components – plant growth, herbivory load, impact on recipient systems – of plant invasions through biogeographic comparisons is important. Our study contributes towards filling this gap in the research, and it is hoped that this method will spread in invasion ecology, making such an approach more common.

Functional group identity and diversity of resident wetland plant communities are good predictors of biotic resistance to invasion by an introduced lineage of Phragmites australis, suggesting niche pre-emption (priority effect) and niche partitioning (diversity effect) as underlying mechanisms. Guiding principles to understand and/or manage biological invasion could emerge from advances in community theory and the use of a functional framework. Targeting widely distributed model invasive species, such as P. australis, could facilitate generalization in invasion ecology and functional ecology.

Our results clearly show that the main secondary metabolite of the invasive red alga B. hamifera has strong allelopathic effects towards native competitors, suggesting that its novel chemical weapon is important for the highly successful invasion of new ranges.

We examined habitat–driven species assemblages and species distribution patterns at three different spatial scales for the three life stages of two censuses of a 25-ha mixed dipterocarp forest at Sinharaja (Sri Lanka). Although the pronounced ridge-valley gradient and contrast of south-west versus north-east aspect created consistent habitats, local species assemblages at Sinharaja forest are jointly shaped by neutral and niche processes.

We showed that there is no universal form of the small scale species-productivity relationship in herbaceous plants, this relationship being actually driven by multiple scale-dependent mechanisms. It is important to consider the joint effect of different factors in explaining species richness patterns rather than to focus on the sole effect of productivity.

The transition from seed to established seedling (STS) represents a major bottleneck in plant demography with implications for community dynamics and the maintenance of species diversity. Our analyses use a long-term dataset to demonstrate the multi-dimensional axes of regeneration niches and how they can be related to seed size.

Our findings suggest that with the absence of a correction for detection errors, maps in plant distribution studies will be confounded with spatial patterns in detection probability. We presume that these problems will be much more widespread in the data sets that are used for conventional plant species distribution modelling. Imperfect detection should be estimated to better control detection errors which may compromise the results of species distribution studies.

Groundcover fuels containing flammable leaves shed by pyrogenic species of savanna trees affect local fire characteristics and resprouting of non-pyrogenic understorey trees. Thus, local variation in flammable fuels produced by pyrogenic species can engineer landscape dynamics of other trees in savannas.

Our results help to resolve questions about the stress-gradient hypothesis (SGH) in semi-arid systems, demonstrating that in mixed tree–grass systems, trees facilitate grass growth in drier regions and suppress grass growth in wetter regions. Relationships differ, however, between African and North American sites representing tropical and temperate bioclimates, respectively. The results of this meta-analysis advance our understanding of tree–grass interactions in savannas and contribute a valuable data set to the developing theory behind the SGH.

Editor's Choice

Our results provide some of the first direct evidence for below-ground species complementarity in heterogeneous natural forests, by demonstrating that tree species evenness increases fine root productivity by filling/exploiting the soil environment more completely in space and time, driven by differences in the inherent rooting traits of the component species and variations of root growth within species.

Modelled annual mortality logits and probabilities over d.b.h. (cm) for beech. Median estimates and 95% credible interval. Tree mortality can be partitioned into different processes related to six distinct mortality modes, jointly explaining the emergent U-shaped curve of size-dependent mortality. This forms a fundamental basis for the understanding of forest dynamics in natural forests and may improve mechanistic modelling thereof.

Species-specific responses to environmental variability imply that tree responses to future climate will likely be not synchronized among species, which may translate into changes in structure and composition of future forest communities. In particular, we speculate that outcome of climate change in respect to relative abundance of black spruce and trembling aspen at the regional levels will be highly dependent on the balance between increasing temperatures and precipitation. Further, species-specific responses of trees to annual climate variability may enhance the resilience of mixed forests by constraining variability in their annual biomass accumulation, as compared with pure stands, under periods with high frequency of climatically extreme conditions.

Gunnera tinctoria is among the largest of herbaceous species. Native to South America, it is widely naturalized in areas with high water availability, where it modifies ecosystem functioning and reduces biodiversity. Predicted changes in climate are likely to promote the expansion of naturalized populations in Britain and Ireland. Its several peculiarities include near obligate dependence on an intracellular symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria.