Recent studies assessing the role of biological diversity for ecosystem functioning indicate that the diversity of functional traits and the evolutionary history of species in a community, not the number of taxonomic units, ultimately drives the biodiversity--ecosystem-function relationship. Here, we simultaneously assessed the importance of plant functional trait and phylogenetic diversity as ...

The spatial patterns of biodiversity and their underlying mechanisms have been an active area of research for a long time. In this study, a total of 63 samples (20m × 30m) were systematically established along elevation gradients on Mount Tai and Mount Lao, China. We explored altitudinal patterns of plant diversity in the two mountain systems. In order to understand the mechanisms driving curre...

Citation: Muñoz MC, Schaefer HM, Böhning-Gaese K, Neuschulz EL and Schleuning M (2017) Phylogenetic and Functional Diversity of Fleshy-Fruited Plants Are Positively Associated with Seedling Diversity in a Tropical Montane Forest. Front. Ecol. Evol. 5:93. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2017.00093 Phylogenetic and Functional Diversity of Fleshy-Fruited Plants Are Positively Associated with Seedling Diversity ...

the study of genetic variation and phylogenetic relationships is essential for the efficient selection of superior plant material and conducting introgression breeding programs. in iran, despite the wide geographical distribution of grasses no report is available on the genetic diversity and relationships of cool season grass populations. in this study amplified fragment length polymorphism (af...

The study of genetic variation and phylogenetic relationships is essential for the efficient selection of superior plant material and conducting introgression breeding programs. In Iran, despite the wide geographical distribution of grasses no report is available on the genetic diversity and relationships of cool season grass populations. In this study amplified fragment length polymorphism (AF...

BACKGROUND Two decades of research showing that increasing plant diversity results in greater community productivity has been predicated on greater functional diversity allowing access to more of the total available resources. Thus, understanding phenotypic attributes that allow species to partition resources is fundamentally important to explaining diversity-productivity relationships. METHO...

42 The study of biodiversity has tended to focus primarily on relatively information poor 43 measures of species diversity. Recently, many studies of local diversity (alpha diversity) 44 have begun to use measures of functional and phylogenetic alpha diversity. Investigations 45 into the phylogenetic and functional dissimilarity (beta diversity) of communities have 46 been far less numerous, bu...

Plant-pollinator coextinctions are likely to become more frequent as habitat alteration and climate change continue to threaten pollinators. The consequences of the resulting collapse of plant communities will depend partly on how quickly plant functional and phylogenetic diversity decline following pollinator extinctions. We investigated the functional and phylogenetic consequences of pollinat...

Understanding drivers of biodiversity patterns is of prime importance in this era of severe environmental crisis. More diverse plant communities have been postulated to represent a larger functional trait-space, more likely to sustain a diverse assembly of herbivore species. Here, we expand this hypothesis to integrate environmental, functional and phylogenetic variation of plant communities as...