Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Plant Biology
When and how does photoinhibition matter for plant fitness?
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
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
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
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
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 [...]
Ecology and conservation of a living fossil: Australias Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis)
Published: 2021-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Horticulture, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The iconic Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) is a critically endangered Australian conifer and one of the world’s rarest trees with only 46 mature individuals remaining in the wild. The species is regarded as a ‘living fossil’ and was discovered on the brink of extinction following a natural historical decline. While its discovery has enabled crucial intervention for its long-term conservation, it [...]
Comment on “Information arms race explains plant-herbivore chemical communication in ecological communities”
Published: 2021-09-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Zu et al (Science, 19 Jun 2020, p. 1377) propose that an ‘information arms-race’ between plants and herbivores explains plant-herbivore communication at the community level. However, our analysis shows that key assumptions of the proposed model either a) conflict with standard evolutionary theory or b) are not supported by the available evidence. We also show that the presented statistical [...]
Plant herbivore protection by arbuscular mycorrhizas: A role for fungal diversity?
Published: 2021-07-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
The symbiotic association between arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and terrestrial plants can enhance plant defences against insect herbivores. Despite advances in our understanding of how AM fungi affect plant tolerance and resistance based defence mechanisms, we contend that the role of fungal diversity in these interactions continues to be largely overlooked. This is problematic considering [...]
ausplotsR: An R package for rapid extraction and analysis of vegetation and soil data collected by Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Published: 2020-12-15
Subjects: Biostatistics, Botany, Life Sciences, Other Plant Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Statistics and Probability
The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), Australia’s national land ecosystem monitoring program, measures critical environmental attributes from local to continental scale and generates quality data for research and land management. Since 2011, TERN has performed standardised field surveys and sampling across a national plot network. At each plot, TERN records vegetation structure, [...]
The photosynthetic pathways of plant species surveyed in Australia’s national terrestrial monitoring network
Published: 2020-11-23
Subjects: Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
The photosynthetic pathway of plants is a fundamental trait that influences terrestrial environments from the local to global level. The abundance of different photosynthetic pathways in Australia is expected to undergo a substantial shift due to climate change and rising atmospheric CO2; however, tracking change is hindered by a lack of data on the pathways of species, as well as their [...]
Resource allocation to growth or luxury consumption drives mycorrhizal responses
Published: 2019-07-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Highly variable phenotypic responses in mycorrhizal plants challenge our functional understanding of plant-fungal mutualisms. Using non-invasive high-throughput phenotyping, we observed that arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi relieved phosphorus (P) limitation and enhanced growth of Brachypodium distachyon under P-limited conditions, while photosynthetic limitation under low nitrogen (N) was [...]