European beech (Fagus sylvatica) is the dominant tree species of Central Europe’s natural forests and one of the continent’s most important timber species. This highly competitive species is known to be drought-sensitive and thus may increasingly be threatened by climate change-related heat waves and drought in part of its distribution range. Tree responses and tolerance to drought are complex processes

Plant invasion is among the most serious of global challenges, affecting ecological processes and threatening biodiversity. With alien plant species (APS) continuously invading new environments, understanding the mechanisms involved in the invasion process will provide important insights for the prediction and control of APS. After over 60 years of invasion biology research, numerous hypotheses to

Species’ responses to antagonists, such as fungal pathogens and insect herbivores, are part of a species’ niche and are thought to contribute to species coexistence. In theory, coexistence is supposed to be maintained by the effects of equalizing mechanisms that reduce fitness differences among species, and stabilizing mechanisms that are the result of niche differences. The presence of stabilizing

Intraspecific trait variability (ITV) is an important component of functional ecology studies. While functional biogeography requires us to understand broad-scale patterns of trait distribution, ITV remains inadequately studied. Due to isolation of ranges, habitat fragmentation and sharp topoclimatic gradients over short distances, temperate mountains offer opportunities to study the ITV in widespread

The Eupatorieae represent nearly 10 % of the Asteraceae, including about 187 genera and 2500 species. With close to 116 genera, South America is one of the richest areas for Eupatorieae diversity. Understanding of the taxonomy of the tribe has been hindered by the morphological variation of its genera and by the partly incongruent circumscription of genera and subtribes yielded by morphological and

Polysporangiate anthers, i.e., anthers bearing more than four sporangia, are an unusual condition that has been reported in several angiosperm families, including Melastomataceae. The structure of anthers in Melastomataceae and taxa from its sister lineage was investigated in 302 species, which were categorized as polysporangiate or non-polysporangiate based on original and literature data. Additionally

Cardamine bulbifera (Coralroot Bittercress) is one of the Central European enigmatic plant species. Although the species is wide-spread all over Europe, no reproduction via seeds has ever been observed. Instead dispersal of vegetative leaf-axillary bulbs assures effective propagation. In our study we analyzed different life stages and factors affecting sexual reproduction and seek for unravelling the

Only few woody species of North Africa have been the subject of biogeographical studies, despite the importance of this region, in the Mediterranean area, for the presence of hotspots of endemism and biodiversity, and of refugia. Here, we present research on the Afro-Mediterranean Cupressus spp., which have a discontinuous and fragmented distribution, resulting from population dynamics experienced

The majority of plants have the ability to reproduce asexually. Despite the importance of asexual reproduction, we still have a limited understanding of how clonality impacts phenotypic and genetic variation within natural populations. Here, we collected phenotypic and genetic data on spatially mapped ramets of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) from 10 belt transects from three populations to determine

Floristic inventories are an essential part of basic and applied research in botany. Despite their long history, floristic research is still carried out following non-objective (preferential) sampling approaches. Accordingly, final outputs (i) are extremely variable in the quality and quantity of collected data and hardly repeatable, (ii) rely on the researcher ability, and (iii) miss the basic assumptions

Hardseededness is a common trait in Mediterranean plant communities, although the origin of its selection is controversial. It may be a mechanism of persistence to fire temperatures, but could also form part of a gap-detecting mechanism to provide germination cues under arid conditions. To disentangle this, we studied the phylogenetic structure of plant communities against fire frequency and aridity

Plant species capable of clonal reproduction range from rare, sterile species that have a high extinction risk to invasive plants that influence the structure of ecosystems. There is increasing evidence that clonality in combination with reduced fecundity and limited dispersal capacity increases extinction risk. As many conservation targets are not well-characterised genetically, our objective was

Geographical range is one of the critical features for species conservation assessment. Nevertheless, species distribution is frequently unknown, undervalued or overlooked. During a broad taxonomic and floristic study of the southern South American prickly pear species (Opuntia spp.), new records of a species previously considered endemic to Argentina have been found in Uruguay and Brazil. Molecular

Successful animal seed dispersal is the result of the interaction between frugivore behavior and the distribution of food resources, which can vary over space and time. We evaluated the interaction between avian frugivores and the masting shrub Pistacia lentiscus in both connected and isolated forest fragments along the Guadalquivir valley (south Iberian Peninsula) in two contrasting fruiting seasons

Clonal plants confer a range of ecologically important traits related to local heterogeneity (e.g., foraging and integration). Disturbances generally impact heterogeneity at a variety of scales, but there is a paucity of research linking disturbance, heterogeneity, and clonal plant response. Further, there is a growing need to understand how different plants respond to changing disturbance regimes

Shared genetic patterns within a community of ecologically distinct species may reflect the role of past geoclimatic events imprinting species evolutionary history. Although Pleistocene glaciations are the most important processes evoked as drivers of these shared patterns, in some regions Quaternary volcanic activity should also be considered as a potential process shaping genetic diversity distribution

Clonality is a largely underexplored plant life-history trait with possibly profound effects on plant demography. Clonal growth constitutes an alternative reproductive pathway, which should provide clonal species with an advantage over non-clonal ones under disturbance regimes unfavourable to regeneration from seeds. We investigated how clonal and non-clonal species differ in their life histories (other

Due to competition for resources, the performance of plant species in communities is modified by traits affecting their efficiency in resource uptake and use. Clonal growth by stolons or rhizomes enables plants to spread laterally and to share resources among interconnected ramets; therefore, clonal growth represents an important trait that likely affects the competitive ability of species. We tested

Climate change is more pronounced in high-elevation habitats than elsewhere, potentially causing disruptions in plant community structure and dynamics through changes in plant interactions. We tested the effect of warming and rainfall manipulations on growth and gas exchange of a cushion plant species, Arenaria tetraquetra, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in SE Spain and assessed its consequences for

The regeneration niche differentiation helps to explain plant coexistence and thus biodiversity. The study of the regeneration niche has been traditionally based on sexual recruitment, while overlooking clonal growth. Root suckering offers a successful alternative for local dispersal under suboptimal conditions for sexual reproduction. For light-limited forests, we hypothesized that: 1) root suckering

Studies that provide support for the conservation of transitions between biogeographic regions should be encouraged, given the ecological and evolutionary specificities of these environments. Investigations on evolutionary history may, for example, influence the prioritization of areas for biological conservation, as they enable a better understanding of the processes that shape communities in space

Most plants are clonal i.e. able to laterally propagate by producing new genetically identical ramets connected by specialized clonal organs. Clonality determines ramet aggregation patterns, the presence of physical connections between ramets, the sharing of resources, hormones, and signaling molecules within the clonal fragment. We thus argue that clonal traits drive not only the individual plant

Identification of centers of endemism is a crucial issue to improve the understanding on overall biodiversity distribution and related conservation actions. Despite the well-known distribution of global endemic areas, less effort has been devoted in defining local hotspots and their ecological determinants. In this study, we analyzed the distribution and the spatial pattern of endemic diversity of

Phylogenetic analysis of plant communities is useful for inferring ecological mechanisms driving forest succession. However, such analysis has scarcely been undertaken in tropical dry environments, especially for the dynamics of demographic components (i.e., recruited, surviving and dead plants) affecting the successional process. Here, we combine chronosequence and dynamic data to study the role of

For clonal plants, spatial spread within a site is primarily determined by production of new ramets, which suggests that allocation to this function is a key component of the population and community dynamics of clonal plant species. However, surprisingly few studies, either theoretical or empirical, quantify the amount of resources that is or should be allocated to new daughters. Instead, the focus

Utricularia intermedia Hayne, U. ochroleuca R.W. Hartm., U. stygia Thor and U. bremii Heer ex Kölliker (Lentibulariaceae, Lamiales) are the four rarest and critically endangered European Utricularia (bladderwort) species from the generic section Utricularia. They are aquatic, submerged or amphibious carnivorous plants with suction traps which grow in very shallow, standing dystrophic (humic) waters

The understorey harbours a substantial part of vascular plant diversity in temperate forests and plays an important functional role, affecting ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling and overstorey regeneration. Global change, however, is putting these understorey communities on trajectories of change, potentially altering and reducing their functioning in the future. Developing mitigation strategies

Changes in vegetative and reproductive phenology rank among the most obvious plant responses to climate change. These responses vary broadly among species, but it is largely unknown whether they are mediated by functional attributes, such as size or foliar traits. Using a manipulative experiment conducted over two growing seasons, we evaluated the responses in reproductive phenology and output of 14

Theoretical models predict lognormal species abundance distributions (SADs) in stable and productive environments, with log-series SADs in less stable, dispersal driven communities. We studied patterns of relative species abundances of perennial vascular plants in global dryland communities to: i) assess the influence of climatic and soil characteristics on the observed SADs, ii) infer how environmental

Previous syntheses on the effects of environmental conditions on the outcome of plant-plant interactions summarize results from pairwise studies. However, the upscaling to the community-level of such studies is problematic because of the existence of multiple species assemblages and species-specific responses to both the environmental conditions and the presence of neighbors. We conducted the first

Plant-plant interactions are driven by environmental conditions, evolutionary relationships (ER) and the functional traits of the plants involved. However, studies addressing the relative importance of these drivers are rare, but crucial to improve our predictions of the effects of plant-plant interactions on plant communities and of how they respond to differing environmental conditions. To analyze

The outcome of plant-plant interactions depends on environmental (e.g. grazing, climatic conditions) and species-specific attributes (e.g. life strategy and dispersal mode of the species involved). However, the joint effects of such factors on pairwise plant-plant interactions, and how they modulate the role of these interactions at the community level, have not been addressed before. We assessed how

Studies of facilitative interactions as drivers of plant richness along environmental gradients often assume the existence of an overarching stress gradient equally affecting the performance of all the species in a given community. However, co-existing species differ in their ecophysiological adaptations, and do not experience the same stress level under particular environmental conditions. Moreover