Plant ecology articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The prevalence of annual plants worldwide rises in response to hot-dry summers, year-to-year variations, and disturbances, potentially impacting the future of ecosystem services provided by perennials.

    • Tyler Poppenwimer
    • , Itay Mayrose
    •  & Niv DeMalach
  • Article |

    Competition for pollinators weakens plant coexistence by destabilizing interactions between plant species; this is crucial for determining the effects of the decline in pollinators.

    • Christopher A. Johnson
    • , Proneet Dutt
    •  & Jonathan M. Levine
  • Article |

    Global inverse modelling of plant water acquisition depth and isotope-based plant water use estimates demonstrate globally prevalent use of precipitation from distant sources, and that water-stressed ecosystems are well suited to using past and remote precipitation.

    • Gonzalo Miguez-Macho
    •  & Ying Fan
  • Article |

    Relationships between leaf size and vein architecture in more than 1,700 grass species worldwide show that grasses native to colder and drier climates have shorter and narrower leaves that provide them with physiological advantages.

    • Alec S. Baird
    • , Samuel H. Taylor
    •  & Lawren Sack
  • Letter |

    Analyses of a global dataset of plant root traits identify an ancestral conservative strategy based on thick roots and mycorrhizal symbiosis, and an evolutionarily more-recent opportunistic strategy of thin roots that efficiently use photosynthetic carbon for soil exploration.

    • Zeqing Ma
    • , Dali Guo
    •  & Lars O. Hedin
  • Letter |

    A dated phylogeny and spatial distribution data for Chinese angiosperms show that eastern China has tended to act as a refugium for older taxa whereas western China has acted as a centre for their evolutionary diversification.

    • Li-Min Lu
    • , Ling-Feng Mao
    •  & Zhi-Duan Chen
  • Letter |

    The authors report on attempts to increase the yield of smallholder farms in China using ten practices recommended by the Science and Technology Backyard for farming maize and wheat at county level.

    • Weifeng Zhang
    • , Guoxin Cao
    •  & Zhengxia Dou
  • Letter |

    Data from millions of trees in thousands of locations are used to show that certain key traits affect competitive ability in predictable ways, and that there are trade-offs between traits that favour growth with and without competition.

    • Georges Kunstler
    • , Daniel Falster
    •  & Mark Westoby
  • Letter |

    Despite substantial evidence that neonicotinoid pesticides can have negative effects on bees, there have been no reports that this leads to problems with pollination; here bumblebee colonies exposed to a neonicotinoid are shown to provide reduced pollination services to apple trees, leading to a reduction in seed number.

    • Dara A. Stanley
    • , Michael P. D. Garratt
    •  & Nigel E. Raine
  • Letter |

    Rare species may have an advantage in a community by suffering less from disease; here it is shown that, because pathogens are shared among species, it is not just the abundance of a particular species but the structure of the whole community that affects exposure to disease.

    • Ingrid M. Parker
    • , Megan Saunders
    •  & Gregory S. Gilbert
  • Letter |

    A global analysis shows that for most tree species the largest trees are the fastest-growing trees, a finding that resolves conflicting assumptions about tree growth and that has implications for understanding forest carbon dynamics, resource allocation trade-offs within trees and plant senescence.

    • N. L. Stephenson
    • , A. J. Das
    •  & M. A. Zavala
  • Letter |

    Plant life-history traits, notably plant investments in growth versus reproduction, can explain the impact of nitrogen:phosphorus stoichiometry on plant species richness; compared with plants in nitrogen-limited communities, plants in phosphorus-limited communities (in which endangered plant species are more common) invest little in phosphorus-intense activity such as sexual reproduction and have conservative leaf traits.

    • Yuki Fujita
    • , Harry Olde Venterink
    •  & Martin J. Wassen
  • News & Views |

    An analysis of the physiological vulnerability of different trees to drought shows that forests around the globe are at equally high risk of succumbing to increases in drought conditions. See Letter p.752

    • Bettina M. J. Engelbrecht
  • Letter |

    Analysis of data from forest plants worldwide shows that margins between threshold xylem pressures at which plants suffer damage and the lowest xylem pressures experienced are small, with no difference between dry and wet forests, providing insight into why drought-induced forest decline is occurring in both arid and wet forests.

    • Brendan Choat
    • , Steven Jansen
    •  & Amy E. Zanne
  • News & Views Forum |

    Predicting plant responses to increasing temperatures is integral to assessing the global impact of climate change. But the authors of a comparative study assert that warming experiments may not accurately reflect observational data. Climate and ecosystem scientists discuss how impact prediction should proceed. See Letter p.494

    • This Rutishauser
    • , Reto Stöckli
    •  & Lara Kueppers
  • Letter |

    Alternative stable states are common in ecosystems, and pose problems for management, but most studied examples are of strongly stable states that switch only rarely after major perturbations. This study fits a model of weakly stable states to a billabong system in which biological control is applied to an invasive weed. Frequent changes in water availability cause shifts between states in which control either is or is not effective. Understanding these shifts could allow intervention to keep the system in the controlled state.

    • Shon S. Schooler
    • , Buck Salau
    •  & Anthony R. Ives
  • Letter |

    The effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function are usually studied within trophic levels. These authors conduct a large experiment across trophic levels to show how manipulations of plant diversity affect function in different groups. The effects are consistent across groups, but are stronger at adjacent trophic levels and in above-ground rather than below-ground groups.

    • Christoph Scherber
    • , Nico Eisenhauer
    •  & Teja Tscharntke
  • Letter |

    It remains uncertain whether added nitrogen enhances total plant productivity in response to CO2-fertilisation in natural ecosystems. Here the authors show that nitrogen addition initially enhances the CO2-stimulation of plant productivity but also promotes the encroachment of plant species that respond less strongly to elevated CO2 concentrations. Overall, the observed shift in the plant community ultimately suppresses the CO2-stimulation of plant productivity.

    • J. Adam Langley
    •  & J. Patrick Megonigal
  • Letter |

    One potential mechanism for maintaining biodiversity is negative feedback between a species and its specific enemies, meaning that other species can grow in its vicinity better than further individuals of the species in question. These authors show that in a tropical forest it is the soil biota that is the main cause of this feedback, and that this effect can explain the diversity.

    • Scott A. Mangan
    • , Stefan A. Schnitzer
    •  & James D. Bever