Black meristematic fungi are cosmopolitan and able to adapt to extreme fluctuations of ultraviolet radiation, temperature, and moisture and grow in exposed habitats such as stone surfaces. In a survey on fungi associated with fruit rots, leaf spots, canker, gummosis, dieback and trunk diseases of grapevine and walnut trees in Kurdistan Province (Iran), some black meristematic fungal isolates re...

Forest dieback and mortality episodes triggered by droughts are receiving increasing attention due to the projected increases in these extreme climate events. However, role played nutrient impairment is understudied, despite interactions among carbon-water balances nutrition. Here, we followed a comparative analysis of long-term growth, intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE), oxygen isotopes (δ1...

The oomycete Phytophthora agathidicida is the causal agent of kauri dieback, which threatens survival endemic (Agathis australis) forests in Aotearoa|New Zealand. Current chemical control P. involves application either a mixture halogenated tertiary amines or phosphite salts with some success, but neither treatment cures disease. Recently, four anti-oomycete fungicides, all different modes acti...

Positive feedbacks in drivers of degradation can cause threshold responses in natural ecosystems. Though threshold responses have received much attention in studies of aquatic ecosystems, they have been neglected in terrestrial systems, such as forests, where the long time-scales required for monitoring have impeded research. In this study we explored the role of positive feedbacks in a tempera...

The only fully coupled land-atmosphere global climate model predicts a widespread dieback of Amazonian forest cover through reduced precipitation. Although these predictions are controversial, the structural and compositional resilience of Amazonian forests may also have been overestimated, as current vegetation models fail to consider the potential role of fire in the degradation of forest eco...

Simulations with the Hadley Centre general circulation model (HadCM3), including carbon cycle model and forced by a 'business-as-usual' emissions scenario, predict a rapid loss of Amazonian rainforest from the middle of this century onwards. The robustness of this projection to both uncertainty in physical climate drivers and the formulation of the land surface scheme is investigated. We analys...

In conjunction with the Permian-Triassic ecologic crisis approximately 250 million years ago, massive dieback of coniferous vegetation resulted in a degradation of terrestrial ecosystems in Europe. A 4- to 5-million-year period of lycopsid dominance followed, and renewed proliferation of conifers did not occur before the transition between Early and Middle Triassic. We document this delayed re-...

In the past two decades, European ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) have been severely damaged due to ash dieback disease, which is caused by the fungal species Hymenoscyphus fraxineus (Chalara fraxinea in the anamorphic stage). Recent molecular phylogenetic and population genetic studies have suggested that this fungus has been introduced from Asia to Europe. During a fungal survey in Korea, H. fraxin...