Market and policy incentives that encourage agricultural intensification, such as incentives for bioenergy, may contribute to biodiversity decline when they encourage a large-scale conversion of native and seminatural ecosystems to production fields. In order to appreciate the impact of these incentives on biodiversity, it is imperative to better understand how native and semi-natural ecosystem...

Microbial symbiosis is integral to plant growth and reproduction, but its contribution to global patterns of plant distribution is unknown. Legumes (Fabaceae) are a diverse and widely distributed plant family largely dependent on symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing rhizobia, which are acquired from soil after germination. This dependency is predicted to limit establishment in new geographic areas, o...

Water is the principal limiting resource for Californian Mediterranean-climate plants. The relationship between rainfall variation and the abundance and distribution of plant species was investigated at the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve near Stanford University. Five years of rainfall data (1986-1990) were combined with a yearly census of plant species on a 100m transect to relate inter-annu...

Both ecological and evolutionary processes can influence community assembly and stability, and native community members may respond both ecologically and evolutionarily as additional species enter established communities. Biological invasions provide a unique opportunity to examine these responses of native community members to novel species additions. Here, I use reciprocal transplant experime...

The idea that dominant invasive plant species outperform neighboring native species through higher rates of carbon assimilation and growth is supported by several analyses of global data sets. However, theory suggests that native and invasive species occurring in low-resource environments will be functionally similar, as environmental factors restrict the range of observed physiological and mor...

DENSLOW M. W. (Department of Biology, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608), M. W. PALMER (Department of Botany, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078), AND Z. E. MURRELL (Department of Biology, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608). Patterns of native and exotic vascular plant richness along an elevational gradient from sea level to the summit of the Appalachian Mou...

Exotic species are thought to alter the structure of natural communities and disrupt ecosystem functioning through invasion. Nevertheless, exotic species may also provide ecological insurance when they contribute to maintain ecosystem functions after the decline of native species following anthropogenic disturbance. Here, this hypothesis is tested with the assemblage of frugivorous birds and fl...

Negative or positive feedback between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and host plants can contribute to plant species interactions, but how this feedback affects plant invasion or resistance to invasion is not well known. Here we tested how alterations in AMF community induced by an invasive plant species generate feedback to the invasive plant itself and affect subsequent interactions betwe...

Anthropogenic global changes in biodiversity are generally portrayed in terms of massive native species losses or invasions caused by recent human disturbance. Yet these biodiversity changes and others caused directly by human populations and their use of land tend to co-occur as long-term biodiversity change processes in the Anthropocene. Here we explore contemporary anthropogenic global patte...