We used spatial simulation models to evaluate how current and two alternative policies might affect potential biodiversity over 100 years in the Coast Ranges Physiographic Province of Oregon. This 2.3-million-ha province is characterized by a diversity of public and private forest owners, and a wide range of forest policy and management objectives. We evaluated habitat availability for seven fo...

Forestry industry in many European countries has begun to focus on sustainable forest management practices, and consequently, a greater emphasis is now being placed on the restoration and enhancement of native woodlands in places where intensive forestry is nowadays not highly profitable. In this context, we evaluate the natural regeneration of native oak woodland vegetation under cultivated st...

Patterns of and controls over N2 fixation by green alder were studied in post-fire, mid-succession, and white spruce upland forests in interior Alaska, focusing on the hypothesis that ecosystem-level nitrogen (N) inputs decrease with successional development. N2-fixation rates tracked plant phenology during the 1997 (drought) and 1998 (normal precipitation) growing seasons. The best model for p...

Questions: What factors influence tree species diversity of mangrove forests, an example of species-poor systems? What are the respective importance and interactions of these factors? Is the intermediate disturbance hypothesis applicable to such systems? Methods: We used the spatially explicit individual-based model KiWi to investigate the effects on species diversity of perturbation frequency ...

Biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) experiments routinely employ common garden designs, drawing samples from a local biota. The communities from which taxa are sampled may not, however, be at equilibrium. To test for temporal changes in BEF relationships, I assembled the pools of aquatic bacterial strains isolated at different time points from leaves on the pitcher plant Darlingtonia californ...

Tropical deforestation is leading not only to losses of biodiversity but also to regional losses of vegetation productivity. However, in many areas the deforestation process is usually accompanied by a fast forest regeneration that produces a mosaic of forest patches in different successional stages. These successional stages have different productivities owing primarily to differences in speci...

Although they are important components of forest communities, the general ecology and spatiotemporal patterns of temperate lianas during forest regeneration are largely unknown. The dependence of lianas on other plants for physical support makes them a potentially important driver of community dynamics. We examined 50 years of vegetation data from an old-field succession study to determine the ...

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) community assembly during primary succession has so far received little attention. It remains therefore unclear, which of the factors, driving AMF community composition, are important during ecosystem development. We addressed this question on a large spoil heap, which provides a mosaic of sites in different successional stages under different managements. We...

The ectomycorrhizal (ECM) symbiosis connects mutualistic plants and fungal species into bipartite networks. While links between one focal ECM plant and its fungal symbionts have been widely documented, systemic views of ECM networks are lacking, in particular, concerning the ability of fungal species to mediate indirect ecological interactions between ECM plant species (projected-ECM networks)....

To date, few analyses of mutualistic networks have investigated successional or seasonal dynamics. Combining interaction data from multiple time points likely creates an inaccurate picture of the structure of networks (because these networks are aggregated across time), which may negatively influence their application in ecosystem assessments and conservation. Using a replicated bipartite mutua...