The primary succession on glacier forelands is characterized by a sequence of early and late successional species, but whether there is also a chronosequence at the intraspecific, genetic level is a matter of debate. Two opposing hypotheses differ in their prediction of genetic diversity in colonizing populations due to founder effects and postcolonization gene immigration. The development of g...

The ecological mechanisms driving community succession are widely debated, particularly for microorganisms. While successional soil microbial communities are known to undergo predictable changes in structure concomitant with shifts in a variety of edaphic properties, the causal mechanisms underlying these patterns are poorly understood. Thus, to specifically isolate how nutrients--important dri...

Biogenic substrata such as epibenthic mussel aggregations are common in coastal regions worldwide and harbour diverse assemblages of sessile and mobile species. However, colonisation patterns on biogenic substrata are still not well understood. We tested whether succession develops as a linear sequence of temporal changes in the species richness and community structure of sessile and mobile ass...

Most studies on frugivorous bat assemblages in secondary forests have concentrated on differences among successional stages, and have disregarded the effect of forest management. Secondary forest management practices alter the vegetation structure and fruit availability, important factors associated with differences in frugivorous bat assemblage structure, and fruit consumption and can therefor...

Pioneer tree species have acquisitive leaf characteristics associated with high demand of light and water, and are expected to be shade and drought intolerant. Using leaf functional traits (specific leaf area, photosynthetic rate, relative water content and stomatal conductance) and tree performance (mortality rate) in the field, we assessed how shade and drought tolerance of leaves are related...

Ratios of ammonium (NH 4 ‡) to nitrate (NO 3 ±) in soils are known to increase during forest succession. Using evidence from several previous studies, we hypothesize that a malfunction in NH 4 ‡ transport at the membrane level might limit the persistence of early successional tree species in later seral stages. In those studies, 13 N radiotracing was used to determine unidirectional fluxes and ...

Biological soil crusts are key mediators of carbon and nitrogen inputs for arid land soils and often represent a dominant portion of the soil surface cover in arid lands. Free-living soil nematode communities reflect their environment and have been used as biological indicators of soil conditions. In this study, we test the hypothesis that nematode communities are successionally more mature ben...

We propose a novel multivariate method to analyse biodiversity data based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. LDA, a probabilistic model, reduces assemblages to sets of distinct component communities. It produces easily interpretable results, can represent abrupt and gradual changes in composition, accommodates missing data and allows for coherent estimates of uncertainty. We illust...

The paper deals with recruitment patterns in larch forests of Mongolia following anthropogenic impacts (felling, fires), and describes successional trends in highland forest communities. It is established that mass seed recruitment of Larix sibirica LEdEb. took place during anomalous combinations of hydrothermal conditions supposedly occurring at periods of about 100 years. During the last deca...

Vegetation succession on Mt Tarawera, Rotorua, New Zealand, a recently erupted volcano, was studied. Field data from 70 plots were collected and analysed by a clustering algorithm. The plots formed an altitudinal and successional series which included bare scoria, herbfield, mixed hardwood, scrub, kamahi forest and tawa forest. Because of the differential effects of the 1886 eruption, different...