Aims In this study, we examined the effects of Solidago altissima (hereafter Solidago) and two species in the genus Verbesina, Verbesina virginica and Verbesina occidentalis (hereafter Verbesina), on the structure of an old-field plant community and establishment by an invasive plant species, Lespedeza cuneata (hereafter Lespedeza). Methods We removed Solidago, Verbesina and both Solidago and V...

buprestid beetles are one of the important components of the biodiversity of forest ecosystem in kurdistan province. different characteristics of biodiversity of buprestid beetles were studied by use of window trap, colored pan and colored sticky trap in these forests during 2009 and 2010. a total of 1205 specimens of 44 species were caught by use of considered traps during appearance of adults...

Bryophyte communities can exhibit similar structural and taxonomic diversity as vascular plant communities, just at a smaller scale. Whether the physiological diversity can be similarly diverse, and whether it can explain local abundance patterns is unknown, due to a lack of community-wide studies of physiological traits. This study re-analyzed data on photosynthesis-related traits (including t...

In tropical ecosystems, ants represent a substantial portion of the animal biomass and contribute to various ecosystem services, including pest regulation and pollination. Dominant ant species are known to determine the structure of ant communities by interfering in the foraging of other ant species. Using bait and pitfall trapping experiments, we performed a pattern analysis at a fine spatial ...

Understanding the impact of species on community structure is a fundamental question in ecology. There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that both subdominant species and parasites can have disproportionately large effects on other organisms. Here we report those impacts for a species that is both subdominant and parasitic, the hemiparasite Rhinanthus minor. While the impact of parasi...

Obligate aerobic AMF taxa have high species richness under waterlogged conditions, but their ecological role remains unclear. Here we focused on AM fungal mediation of plant interactions in a marshland plant community. Five cooccurring plant species were chosen for a neighbor removal experiment in which benomyl was used to suppress AMF colonization. A Phragmites australis removal experiment was...

The set S(g, n) of all stochastic matrices of order n whose directed graph has girth g is considered. For any g and n, a lower bound is provided on the modulus of a subdominant eigenvalue of such a matrix in terms of g and n, and for the cases g = 1, 2, 3 the minimum possible modulus of a subdominant eigenvalue for a matrix in S(g, n) is computed. A class of examples for the case g = 4 is inves...