Johnson and colleagues (Reports, 18 May 2012, p. 904) claim that conspecific negative density dependence is a pervasive mechanism driving forest diversity, especially for rare tree species. We show that their results are due to a statistical bias in their analysis caused by the exclusion of joint absences.

Enrichment planting within established plantations or secondary forests is a common strategy to enhance forest recovery, given that later successional forest species tend to have low dispersal and limited recruitment into these sites. It is difficult, however, to predict how species of seedlings will perform when planted under different overstory species. The field of phylogenetic ecology offer...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Global pollinator declines and continued habitat fragmentation highlight the critical need to understand reproduction and gene flow across plant populations. Plant size, conspecific density and local kinship (i.e. neighbourhood genetic relatedness) have been proposed as important mechanisms influencing the reproductive success of flowering plants, but have rarely been simult...

a geometric morphometric study of the genus erodiontes was carried out using the elliptic fourier method to demonstrate the effect of vicariance on populations of these psammophilous species. four populations of erodiontes, comprising e. aelleni and e. pfaundleri, were sampled from chartaghi, aboozeidabad, meser and hojatabad. differences between the shapes of the conspecific populations are mi...

Specialist herbivores and pathogens could induce negative conspecific density dependence among their hosts and thereby contribute to the diversity of plant communities. A small number of hyperdiverse genera comprise a large portion of tree diversity in tropical forests. These closely related congeners are likely to share natural enemies. Diverse defenses could still allow congeners to partition...

Although genetic methods of species identification, especially DNA barcoding, are strongly debated, tests of these methods have been restricted to a few empirical cases for pragmatic reasons. Here we use simulation to test the performance of methods based on sequence comparison (BLAST and genetic distance) and tree topology over a wide range of evolutionary scenarios. Sequences were simulated o...

Competition and facilitation between tree individuals are two kinds of non-random processes influencing the structure and functioning of forest communities, but how these two plant-plant interactions change along gradient of resources or environments remains very much a matter of debate. We developed a null model to test the size-distance regression, and assessed the effects of competition and ...

Higher interclutch colour variation can evolve under the pressure of brood parasitism to increase the detection of parasitic eggs. Nest sanitation could be a prerequisite for the evolution of anti-parasite defence in terms of egg ejection. In this respect, we used nest sanitation behaviour as a tool to identify: i) motivation and its underlying function and, ii) which features provoke ejection ...