Declining plant species richness in agro-ecosystems and thus reduced habitat quality can have cascading effects on ecosystem functioning, leading to reduced pollination and biological control. Here we test if plant diversity can affect arthropod diversity and abundance on a very small scale, manipulating plant species richness (2, 6, 12 and 20 sown species) in small adjacent subplots (63 9 m) i...

Top-down control of prey by predators are magnified in productive ecosystems due to higher sustenance of prey communities. In soil micro-arthropod food webs, plant communities regulate the availability of basal resources like soil microbial biomass. Mixed plant communities are often associated with higher microbial biomass than monocultures. Therefore, top-down control is expected to be higher ...

Plant cover is a fundamental feature of many coastal marine and terrestrial systems and controls the structure of associated animal communities. Both natural and human-mediated changes in plant cover influence abiotic sediment properties and thus have cascading impacts on the biotic community. Using clipping (structural) and light (shading) manipulations in two salt marsh vegetation zones (one ...

We investigated soil streptomycete communities associated with four host plant species (two warm season C4 grasses: Andropogon gerardii, Schizachyrium scoparium and two legumes: Lespedeza capitata, Lupinus perennis), grown in plant communities varying in species richness. We used actinobacteria-selective PCR coupled with pyrosequencing to characterize streptomycete community composition and str...

This paper develops a hierarchical and modular control architecture for so called sequential behaviours, i.e. for plant dynamics and specifications that are represented as formal languages of infinite-length words. Our main result is the elaboration of structural properties that allow for abstraction based controller design and that are preserved under closed-loop composition. Thus, we propose ...

PURPOSE Marrubium crassidens, a plant belonging to the family Lamiaceae, was studied for its volatile components present in the aerial parts of the plant during the flowering stage. METHODS The essential oil of the plant obtained through hydrodistillation of the dried plant material was assessed for its chemical composition by GC/MS and GC-FID analyses. RESULTS Twenty-five compounds were id...

Phenotypes and behaviors respond to resource constraints via adaptation, but the influence of ecological limitations on the composition of eukaryotic genomes is still unclear. We trace connections between plant ecology and genomes through their elemental composition. Inorganic sources of nitrogen (N) are severely limiting to plants in natural ecosystems. This constraint would favor the use of N...

Plant membrane lipids are primarily composed of 16-carbon and 18-carbon fatty acids containing up to three double bonds. By contrast, the seed oils of many plant species contain fatty acids with significantly different structures. These unusual fatty acids sometimes accumulate to >90% of the total fatty acid content in the seed triacylglycerols, but are generally excluded from the membrane lipi...

Global energy use and food production have increased nitrogen inputs to ecosystems worldwide, impacting plant community diversity, composition, and function. Previous studies show considerable variation across terrestrial herbaceous ecosystems in the magnitude of species loss following nitrogen (N) enrichment. What controls this variation remains unknown. We present results from 23 N-addition e...