Plant species richness of permanent grasslands has often been found to be significantly associated with productivity. Concentrations of nutrients in biomass can give further insight into these productivity-plant species richness relationships, e.g. by reflecting land use or soil characteristics. However, the consistency of such relationships across different regions has rarely been taken into a...

Plant species richness of permanent grasslands has often been found to be significantly associated with productivity. Concentrations of nutrients in biomass can give further insight into these productivity-plant species richness relationships, e.g. by reflecting land use or soil characteristics. However, the consistency of such relationships across different regions has rarely been taken into a...

Plant biomass is considered as an important renewable resource for future bioenergy needs. Cell walls, which are typically highly recalcitrant, constitute the major part of this biomass. Overcoming the cell wall recalcitrance is considered as a major bottleneck towards achieving a highly sustainable and cost-effective production of biofuels from ligno-cellulosic materials [1]. Cell wall compone...

A general allometric scaling model predicts that plant body mass MT will scale as the −4/3 power of plant density N. Here, we show how this model predicts numerous other scaling attributes of plant populations and communities, including annual growth rate GT, standing leaf biomass ML, basal stem diameter D, and aboveand below-ground biomass, MSH and MR. These predictions are consistent with the...

Fuel ethanol production from plant biomass hydrolysates by the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is of great economic and environmental significance. Costeffective production of ethanol from plant biomass should not only be based on the readily fermentable starch and sucrose fractions of plant carbohydrates, but also on the much more resistant lignocellulosic fractions. The utilization of ...

Plant biomass is the major carbon source for many fungal species. Due to its complex polymeric nature, degradation of this biomass to digestible monomers requires a large range of enzyme activities. With the availability of an increasing number of fungal genomes, new insights into the diversity of fungi with respect to plant biomass degradation have been obtained. Recent progress in this area w...

Ecosystem and biogeochemical responses to anthropogenic stressors are the result of complex interactions between plants and microbes. A mechanistic understanding of how plant traits influence microbial processes is needed in order to predict the ecosystem-level effects of natural or anthropogenic change. This is particularly true in wetland ecosystems, where plants alter the availability of bot...

It has become clear that plants can create soils that affect subsequent plant growth. However, because plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) are typically measured in monoculture experiments, it remains unclear to what extent PSFs affect plant growth in communities. Here we used data from a factorial PSF experiment to predict the biomass of 12 species grown in 162 plant community combinations. Five diffe...

Ecologically significant symbiotic associations are frequently studied in isolation, but such studies of two-way interactions cannot always predict the responses of organisms in a community setting. To explore this issue, we adopt a community approach to examine the role of plant-microbial and insect-microbial symbioses in modulating a plant-herbivore interaction. Potato plants were grown under...

We extend the resource concentration hypothesis (herbivorous insects are more likely to find and stay in more dense and less diverse patches of their host plants) to plant communities. Specifically, whenever superior plant competitors spread to form dense stands, they will be found and attacked by their specialist insect enemies. This will decrease host plant abundance, causing a reduction in s...