Conspecific adults have strong negative effect on the survival of nearby early-stage seedlings and thus can promote species coexistence by providing space for the regeneration of heterospecifics. The leaf litter fall from the conspecific adults, and it could mediate this conspecific negative adult effect. However, field evidence for such effect of conspecific leaf litter remains absent. In this...

Deforestation and forest fragmentation are known major causes of nonrandom extinction, but there is no information about their impact on the phylogenetic diversity of the remaining species assemblages. Using a large vegetation dataset from an old hyper-fragmented landscape in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest we assess whether the local extirpation of tree species and functional impoverishment ...

Tree survival plays a central role in forest ecosystems. Although many factors such as tree size, abiotic and biotic neighborhoods have been proposed as being important in explaining patterns of tree survival, their contributions are still subject to debate. We used generalized linear mixed models to examine the relative importance of tree size, local abiotic conditions and the density and iden...

1 Bearing tree data were used to characterize the composition and spatial structure of the southern boreal presettlement forest in north-eastern Minnesota, United States of America. Data collected during the General Land Office Survey (GLO) between 1853 and 1917, represents 35 324 samples (each with 1–4 trees) in a 3.2 million-hectare landscape. Nine tree species contributed at least 1% to the ...

Question: What factors limit woody plant recruitment in a mosaic landscape where former agricultural lands are dominated by the invasive tree Ligustrum lucidum (Oleaceae)? Location: Subtropical northwestern Argentina. Methods: In secondary forest patches, we measured (1) tree, shrub and liana abundance in different size classes; (2) seed rain of Ligustrum and two native trees and (3) topographi...

According to the Janzen-Connell hypothesis for the maintenance of species diversity, recruitment is inhibited in the immediate vicinity of adults by herbivores and pathogens. This reduces the per capita ability of abundant species to reproduce, relative to less common species, and gives rare or competitively inferior species a greater chance to persist. We tested this hypothesis in a 50-ha mapp...

Animals often communicate in environments with high levels of biotic noise that arises from the signals of other individuals. Although effects of background biotic noise on mate recognition and discrimination have been widely studied in air-born sound communication, little is known about incidental interference between signallers that use substrate-borne vibrational signals. In this study we in...

Understanding how drivers of ecological disturbance operate across scales is important in an era increasing activity. Severe and extensive Dendroctonus bark beetle outbreaks western North America have left their wake dominance by shade-tolerant commonly late-seral trees such as subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa), which can foster resilience forest cover. However, decline (SFD) a poorly understood...