Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Plant Biology
Tundra vegetation community, not microclimate, controls asynchrony of above and belowground phenology
Published: 2024-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The below-ground growing season often extends beyond the above-ground growing season in tundra ecosystems. However, we do not yet know where and when this occurs and whether these phenological asynchronies are driven by variation in local vegetation communities or by spatial variation in microclimate. Here, we combined above- and below-ground plant phenology metrics to compare the relative [...]
Gaining insights into the life-history strategies of tropical tree species from a large urban inventory dataset
Published: 2024-06-11
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Management, Horticulture, Integrative Biology, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Trees are important ecosystem service providers that improve the physical environment and human experience in cities throughout the world. Since the ecosystem services and maintenance requirements of urban trees change as they grow in time, predictive models of tree growth rates are useful to forecast societal benefits and maintenance costs over a tree’s lifetime. However, many models to date are [...]
Species- and community-level demographic responses of saplings to drought during tropical secondary succession
Published: 2024-06-01
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Forest Biology, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Naturally regenerating secondary vegetation dominates the tropical forest landscapes, showing a remarkable capacity to sequester carbon, but such a role is threatened by increasing drought predicted with climate change. To understand how secondary forest species and communities respond to drought, we leverage a long-term chronosequence of tropical successional forests from Central Panama that [...]
The metabolite transporters of C4 photosynthesis.
Published: 2024-02-29
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
Published: 2024-02-02
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
Published: 2024-01-11
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
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
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
Published: 2023-03-20
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
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
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
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
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?
Published: 2022-09-14
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
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 [...]