1. One line of thinking is that highly successful plant invaders achieve dominance in recipient communities via competitive superiority over natives. In contrast, it has been proposed that exotic species attain dominance not by competitive prowess but due to their colonizing abilities after disturbance. Interestingly, there have been relatively few attempts to quantify competitive effects of in...

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) can be defined as the acquisition of genetic material from another organism without being its offspring. HGT is common in the microbial world including archaea and bacteria, where HGT mechanisms are widely understood and recognized as an important force in evolution. In eukaryotes, HGT now appears to occur more frequently than originally thought. Many studies are ...

Although global change is known to influence plant invasion, little is known about interactions between altered precipitation and invasion. In the North American mixedgrass prairie, invasive species are often abundant in wet and nitrogen (N)-rich areas, suggesting that predicted changes in precipitation and N deposition could exacerbate invasion. Here, this possibility was tested by seeding six...

E dolgozatban a Linaria szekcióba tartozó biebersteinii és L. angustissima kárpát-medencei elterjedését virágzásfenológiáját elemeztem Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum herbáriuma, valamint saját megfigyeléseim alapján. Arra kerestem választ, hogy van-e köztük különbség fentiek tekintetében, fennáll-e kereszteződésük lehetősége Kárpát-medencében. A két faj előfordulási helyeit ellenőrzött herbár...

High inbreeding depression is thought to be one of the major factors preventing evolutionary transitions in hermaphroditic plants from self-incompatibility (SI) and outcrossing toward self-compatibility (SC) and selfing. However, when selfing does evolve, inbreeding depression can be quickly purged, allowing the evolution of complete self-fertilization. In contrast, populations that show interm...

1. Nitrogen enrichment is an important driver of environmental change. In the present study, plant-mediated effects of increased nitrogen on a specialist herbivore, Calophasia lunula Hufnagel, which sequesters antirrhinoside, an iridoid glycoside produced by its host plants, were examined. 2. Caterpillars were reared on Linaria dalmatica plants grown under low or high N treatments, and C. lunul...

As global changes reorganize plant communities, invasive plants may benefit. We hypothesized that elevated CO2 and warming would strongly influence invasive species success in a semi-arid grassland, as a result of both direct and water-mediated indirect effects. To test this hypothesis, we transplanted the invasive forb Linaria dalmatica into mixed-grass prairie treated with free-air CO2 enrich...