Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Plant Biology

The metabolite transporters of C4 photosynthesis.

Oliver Mattinson, Steven Kelly

Published: 2024-02-28
Subjects: Plant Biology

C4 photosynthesis is a highly efficient form of photosynthesis that utilises a biochemical pump to concentrate CO2 around rubisco. Although variation in the implementation of this biochemical pump exists between species, each variant of the C4 pathway is critically dependent on metabolite transport between organelles and between cells. Here we review our understanding of metabolite transport in [...]

Sexual system variation in the legumes (Fabaceae): prospects for morphological, evolutionary and genomic study

Quentin Cronk, Leonardo M Borges

Published: 2024-02-01
Subjects: Biology, Botany, Plant Biology, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Although the great majority of legume species are cosexual with hemaphrodite flowers, a variety of sexual systems are observed in the family including monoecy, andromonoecy, androdioecy and dioecy. Such broad terms conceal much variation, details that may be of importance in understanding the evolutionary and ecological basis of reproductive systems. This variation is often inadequately described [...]

The role of deadwood in the carbon cycle: Implications for models, forest management, and future climates

Baptiste Joseph Wijas, Steven D Allison, Amy T Austin, et al.

Published: 2024-01-10
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Deadwood represents a significant carbon pool in forests and savannas. Although previous research has focused mainly on forests, we synthesise deadwood studies across all ecosystems with woody vegetation. Storage and release of carbon from deadwood is controlled by interacting decomposition drivers including biotic consumers (animals, microbes) and abiotic factors (water, fire, sunlight, [...]

Polyploid plants take cytonuclear perturbations in stride

Daniel B Sloan, Justin L Conover, Corrinne E Grover, et al.

Published: 2023-11-13
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Biology

Hybridization in plants is often accompanied by nuclear genome doubling (allopolyploidy), which has been hypothesized to perturb interactions between nuclear and cytoplasmic (mitochondrial and plastid) genomes by creating imbalances in the relative copy number of these genomes and producing genetic incompatibilities between maternally derived cytoplasmic genomes and the half of the allopolyploid [...]

Plant diversity dynamics over space and time in a warming Arctic

Mariana García Criado, Isla H. Myers-Smith, Anne D. Bjorkman, et al.

Published: 2023-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, and plant communities are responding through shifts in species abundance, composition and distribution. However, the direction and magnitude of local plant diversity changes have not been quantified thus far at a pan-Arctic scale. Using a compilation of 42,234 records of 490 vascular plant species from 2,174 plots at 45 study areas [...]

Allelopathy-selected microbiomes mitigate chemical inhibition of plant performance

Daniel Philip Revillini, Aaron S. David, Carolina Vigo, et al.

Published: 2023-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Biology

Allelopathy is a common and important stressor that shapes plant communities and can alter soil microbiomes, yet little is known about the direct effects of allelochemical addition on bacterial and fungal communities or the potential for allelochemical-selected microbiomes to mediate plant performance responses, especially in habitats naturally structured by allelopathy. Here we present the first [...]

Hybridization boosters diversification in a Neotropical orchid group

Cecilia F. Fiorini, Eric de Camargo Smidt, L. Lacey Knowles, et al.

Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genomics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Population Biology

Genetic data shows that cryptic hybrids are more common than previously thought and that hybridization and introgression are widespread processes in nature. Regardless of this, studies on hybridization are scarce for the highly speciose Bulbophyllum. The genus presents more than 2,200 species and many examples of recent radiations, in which hybridization is expected to be frequent. Currently, [...]

Plant traits poorly predict winner and loser shrub species in a warming tundra biome

Mariana García Criado, Isla H. Myers-Smith, Anne D. Bjorkman, et al.

Published: 2022-11-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Climate change is leading to a species redistributions. In the tundra biome, many shrub species are expanding into new areas, a process known as shrubification. However, not all tundra shrub species will benefit from warming. Winner and loser species (those projected to expand and contract their ranges, and/or those that have increased or decreased in cover over time), and the characteristics [...]

Unstratified forests dominate the tropics especially in regions with lower fertility or higher temperatures

Christopher Doughty, Camille Gaillard, Andrew Abraham, et al.

Published: 2022-11-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Forest Biology, Plant Biology

The stratified nature of tropical forest structure had been noted by early explorers, but until recent use of satellite-based LiDAR (GEDI, or Global Ecosystems Dynamics Investigation LiDAR), there has been no way to quantify stratification across all tropical forests. Understanding stratification is important because by some estimates, a majority of the world’s species inhabit tropical forest [...]

Deep reticulation: the long legacy of hybridization in vascular plant evolution

Gregory W Stull, Kasey K Pham, Pamela S Soltis, et al.

Published: 2022-10-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences

Hybridization has long been recognized as a fundamental evolutionary process in plants, but our understanding of its phylogenetic distribution and biological significance across deep evolutionary scales has been largely obscure—until recently. Over the past decade, genomic and phylogenomic datasets have revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, that hybridization, often associated with polyploidy, has [...]

When and how does photoinhibition matter for plant fitness?

Shan Kothari

Published: 2022-09-13
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

The many biophysical factors that shape how plant species sort across environmental gradients may include photoinhibition, which I define broadly as oxidative damage that plants and other phototrophs risk incurring when they absorb excess light energy they cannot safely dissipate. Photoinhibition is seldom explicitly discussed as a potential driver of plant fitness and distributions. Here, I aim [...]

A vegetation carbon isoscape for Australia built by combining continental-scale field surveys with remote sensing

Samantha Munroe, Greg Guerin, Francesca A. McInerney, et al.

Published: 2022-04-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences

Context: Maps of C3 and C4 plant abundance and stable carbon isotope values (δ13C) across terrestrial landscapes are valuable tools in ecology to investigate species distribution and carbon exchange. Australia has a predominance of C4-plants, thus monitoring change in C3:C4 cover and δ13C is essential to national management priorities. Objectives: We applied a novel combination of field surveys [...]

The easyclimate R package: easy access to high-resolution daily climate data for Europe

Verónica Cruz-Alonso, Christoph Pucher, Sophia Ratcliffe, et al.

Published: 2022-03-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences

In recent decades there has been an increasing demand by ecologists for harmonized climatic data at large spatial scales and spanning long periods. Here we present easyclimate, a software package to obtain daily climatic data at high resolution (0.0083º, ~1 km) with R. The package facilitates the downloading and processing of precipitation, minimum and maximum temperatures for Europe from 1950 to [...]

Plant spectra as integrative measures of plant phenotypes

Shan Kothari, Anna Schweiger

Published: 2022-03-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

1. Spectroscopy at the leaf or canopy scales is becoming one of the core tools of plant functional ecology. Remotely sensed reflectance spectra can allow ecologists to infer plant traits and strategies—and the community- or ecosystem-level processes they correlate with—continuously over unprecedented spatial scales. 2. Because of the complex entanglement of structural and chemical factors that [...]

The Global Forest Health Crisis: A Public Good Social Dilemma in Need of International Collective Action

Geoffrey M Williams, Matthew D. Ginzel, Zhao Ma, et al.

Published: 2022-03-11
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Behavioral Economics, Biodiversity, Biology, Biosecurity, Botany, Economics, Entomology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Environmental Studies, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, International Relations, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Pathogenic Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences, Political Science, Science and Technology Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Society is confronted by interconnected threats to ecological sustainability. Among these is the devastation of forests by destructive non-native pathogens and insects introduced through global trade, leading to the loss of critical ecosystem services and a global forest health crisis. We argue that the forest health crisis is a public good social dilemma and propose a response framework that [...]

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