Silicon (Si) accumulation alleviates a diverse array of environmental stresses in many plants, including conferring physical resistance against insect herbivores. It has been hypothesised that grasses, in particular, utilise ‘low metabolic cost’ Si for structural and defensive roles under nutrient limitation. While carbon (C) concentrations often negatively correlate with Si concentrations, the relationship

Nitrogen (N) is a critical element for vegetation growth and subsequent carbon (C) and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. Plant N uptake, the only pathway for plants to directly obtain N from soils, is a bottleneck process for ecosystem C and N cycling. Ecological theories predict that deciduous trees remain dormant and do not take up N during winters as no growth occurs during this season

Land abandonment has been increasing in recent decades in Europe, usually accompanied by biodiversity decline. Whether livestock grazing and mowing can safeguard biodiversity across spatial scales in the long term is unclear. Using a 48-year experiment in a salt marsh, we compared land abandonment (without grazing and mowing) and seven management regimes including cattle grazing, early season mowing

The biotic resistance hypothesis suggests that biodiversity rich areas should be resistant to biological invasions. Globally, conservationists use this hypothesis to protect diverse ecosystems. However, supporting data are often contradictory, possibly due to several confounding factors. Complexity in inferences increase in the tropics, which are sparsely studied. We hypothesize that human impacts

1. Engineering resilience, a forest’s ability to maintain its properties in the event of disturbance, comprises two components: resistance and recovery. In human-dominated landscapes, forest resilience depends mostly on recovery. Forest recovery largely depends on autogenic regulation, which entails a negative feedback loop between rates of change of forest state variables and state variables themselves

Species at their warm range margin are potentially threatened by higher temperatures, but may persist in microrefugia. Whether such microsites occur due to more suitable microclimate or due to lower biotic pressure from e.g. competitive species, is still not fully resolved.

Widely distributed species are often locally adapted to climate gradients across their ranges. But little is known about patterns of intraspecific adaptation in desert shrubs. We examined questions of local adaptation in multiple populations of two common shrub species of the winter-wet Mojave Desert in North America in a multiple common-garden experiment. Plants were raised in the greenhouse and transplanted

Human activities have massively increased the amount of reactive nitrogen in the biosphere, which is leading to increased nitrogen (N) inputs in terrestrial ecosystems. The retention of N is a crucial ecosystem function of both managed and natural ecosystems, and there is a long history of experimental, observational, and conceptual studies identifying its major controls. Yet, the plant and soil microbial

Seed dispersal by frugivores plays a key role in structuring and maintaining tree diversity in forests. However, little is known about how the spatial legacy of seed dispersal and early recruitment shapes spatial patterns and the spatial interaction network of plant species in mature forest communities.

A higher frequency and intensity of droughts will impair forest productivity. Therefore, improving our understanding of which factors enhance tree growth resilience against drought has become a crucial issue, but we lack information at the intraspecific level. In this study, we investigate the role played by climatic conditions and tree characteristics in the growth response to severe droughts in two

Newly germinated seedlings are vulnerable to biomass removal but usually have at least six months to grow before they are exposed to dry-season fires, a major disturbance in savannas. In contrast, plants are exposed to browsers from the time they germinate, making browsing potentially a very powerful bottleneck for establishing seedlings.

The effect of species loss on ecosystem productivity is determined by both the functional contribution of the species lost, and the response of the remaining species in the community. According to the mass-ratio hypothesis, the loss of a dominant plant species, which has a larger proportionate contribution to productivity, is expected to exert an overwhelming effect on this important ecosystem function