Find research datasets worth reusing

Figure 2 in Megalopodidae (Insecta, Coleoptera): new occurrence and host plant records for Brazil

Figure 2. Species of Megalopodinae (Megalopodidae) on its host plants, registered in southwestern Paraná. (A) Agathomerus (E.) elegans feeding on Solanum (cf., S. variabile) (Solanaceae); (B) Mastostethus pantherinus feeding on Vernonanthura (cf., V. tweediena) (Asteraceae); (C) Agathomerus (A.) flavomaculatus feeding on Solanum (cf., S. variabile) (Solanaceae); (D) Agathomerus (E.) sellatus feeding on Solanum betaceum (Solanaceae).

Figure 3 in Bird-plant interaction networks in native forests and eucalyptus plantations within a protected area

Figure 3. Comparison of the number of interactions between frugivorous birds and plants between native forest and eucalyptus plantation in the PEIT. (a): Fecal samples interactions (P-value = 0.83, W = 3.5); (b): Focal observation interactions (P-value = 0.99, W = 4.0).

Figure 2 in Bird-plant interaction networks in native forests and eucalyptus plantations within a protected area

Figure 2. Interaction networks between frugivorous birds and zoochoric plants, according to the focal observations of birds in both sampled habitats. The circles represent the plant species, and the species of birds are represented by triangles. The acronyms in the center of the figures are the scientific names of the species (Supplementary material 1). The thickness of the links (lines) is related to the connectivity between each species (the thicker the line, the more records this interaction had). Each color represents a cluster of species that are more connected within each other than with between species from other clusters due to its modularity (Q). (a): Fragments of native forest; (b): Fragments of eucalyptus plantation.

Figure 1 in Bird-plant interaction networks in native forests and eucalyptus plantations within a protected area

Figure 1. Interaction networks between frugivorous birds and zoochoric plants, according to the fecal samples of birds in the understory of the two sampled habitats. The circles represent the plant species, and the triangles are representing the species of birds. The acronyms in the center of the figures are the scientific names of the species (Supplementary material 1). The thickness of the links (lines) is related to the connectivity between each species (the thicker the line, the more records this interaction had). Each color represents a cluster of species that are more connected within each other than with species from other clusters due to its modularity (Q). (a): F fragments of native forest; (b): Fragments of eucalyptus plantation.

opencc-by-nc-4.0Oct 2019View details →

Figure 5 in Knowledge gaps regarding frugivorous ecological networks between birds and plants in Brazil

Figure 5. Complex ecological network constructed from information about interactions between frugivorous birds (triangles) and non-native plants (circles) in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (A) and Cerrado (B). Each color represents an agglomerate of species that are more connected among themselves than with species of other agglomerates. Names in triangles and circles represent are abbreviations of species names. Abbreviations are defined in the supplementary material (S1).

opencc-by-nc-4.0Oct 2019View details →

Figure 3 in Knowledge gaps regarding frugivorous ecological networks between birds and plants in Brazil

Figure 3. Complex ecological network constructed with information about interactions between frugivorous birds (triangles) and plants (circles) in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Each color represents an agglomerate of species that are more connected among themselves than with species of other agglomerates. Species with the highest values of connectivity and centrality are circled. Names in triangles and circles are abbreviations of species names. Abbreviations are defined in the supplementary material (S1).

opencc-by-nc-4.0Oct 2019View details →

Figure 4 in Knowledge gaps regarding frugivorous ecological networks between birds and plants in Brazil

Figure 4. Complex ecological network constructed with information about interactions between frugivorous birds (triangles) and plants (circles) in the Brazilian Cerrado. Each color represents an agglomerate of species that are more connected among themselves than with species of other agglomerates. Species with the highest values of connectivity and centrality are circled. Names in triangles and circles are abbreviations of species names. Abbreviations are defined in the supplementary material (S1).

opencc-by-4.0Jul 2021View details →

Fig. 9 in Isert and Thonning's plants and Schumacher's Beskrivelse af Guineiske Planter (1827) - A Danish legacy to the study of the West African flora

Fig. 9. – Title page of the 1827 preprint of Beskrivelse af Guineiske Planter.

opencc-by-4.0Jul 2021View details →

Fig. 2. – A in Isert and Thonning's plants and Schumacher's Beskrivelse af Guineiske Planter (1827) - A Danish legacy to the study of the West African flora

Fig. 2. – A. Portrait of Peter Thonning; B. Portrait of Heinrich Christian Friedrich Schumacher.

Effects of warming temperatures on germination responses and trade-offs between seed traits in an alpine plant

1. Climate warming may affect multiple aspects of plant life history, including important factors such as germination responses and the key trade-off between offspring size and number. As a case study to address these concepts, we used an alpine plant (waxy bluebell, Wahlenbergia ceracea; Campanulaceae) that shows plasticity to warming in seed traits and in which seed dormancy status regulates germination. We chose an alpine species because alpine environments are ecosystems particularly under threat by climate change. 2. We conducted germination assays under cool and warm temperatures using seeds produced by individuals that were grown under historical (cooler) and future (warmer) temperature scenarios. We assessed the presence of a seed size vs number trade-off, and then examined the effects of seed number and size on germination percentage, the fractions of dormant and viable seeds, and germination velocity. Further, we examined whether warming during parental growth and during germination affected these relationships. 3. We found evidence for a seed size vs number trade-off only under historical parental temperatures. Indeed, under future growth temperatures, parental plants produced fewer and smaller seeds and there was no evidence of a trade-off. However, the reductions in both seed traits under warming did not affect germination, despite correlations of seed size and number with germination traits. Warming increased germination, particularly of larger seeds, but overall it resulted in more than fourfold reductions in parental fitness. 4. Synthesis. Our study shows the importance of growth conditions when evaluating the seed size vs number trade-off. Stressful conditions, such as warmer temperatures, can restrain the ability of plants to reach optimal investment in reproduction, masking the trade-off. By analysing responses across the whole life cycle, we show here an overall detrimental effect of warming, highlighting the potential risk of climate change for W. ceracea, and, potentially, for alpine plant communities more widely.

Changing plant species composition and richness benefit soil carbon sequestration under climate warming

Anthropogenic warming and land-use change are expected to accelerate global soil organic carbon (SOC) losses and change plant species composition and richness. However, how changes in plant composition and species richness mediate SOC responses to climate warming and land-use change remains poorly understood. Using data from a 7-year warming and clipping field experiment in an alpine meadow on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, we examined the direct effects of warming and clipping on SOC storage versus their indirect effects mediated by plant functional type and species richness. We found that warming significantly increased SOC storage by 8.1% and clipping decreased it by 6.4%, which was closely correlated with the corresponding response of below-ground net primary productivity (BNPP). We also found a negative correlation between SOC storage and species richness, which was ascribed to the increased BNPP via enhancing the dominance of grasses and decreasing species richness under warming. The lower SOC storage under clipping was caused by the clipping-induced decrease in BNPP via weakening the dominance of grasses and increasing species richness. Our findings highlight that the SOC storage in this alpine meadow under climate warming and clipping was primarily governed by BNPP, which was mediated by changes in the dominance of grasses and species richness. Overall, our study demonstrates that shifting to the dominance of grasses and changing species richness would benefit soil C sequestration under climate warming, but this positive effect would be dampened by grazing or hay harvest.

Correlation between fine root traits and pathogen richness depends on plant mycorrhizal types

Root uptake strategies are associated with the strength of negative plant–soil feedback induced (PSF) induced by soil pathogens. Given the intensified effect of pathogen richness in fine roots on the strength of negative PSF through the synergistic effects of multiple pathogens, researchers have proposed a trade-off between nutrient acquisition and pathogen defence in roots. However, empirical evidence is lacking. In addition, because the interaction between pathogens and fine roots depends on the mycorrhizal types of tree species, both fine root traits and mycorrhizal types should be incorporated to reveal covariation in pathogen richness and the strength of negative PSF. In this study, we selected 50 arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) tree species and 7 ectomycorrhizal (ECM) tree species in a subtropical forest to investigate the relationships between fine root traits and pathogen richness in fine roots and determined whether their relationships depended on plant mycorrhizal types. Our results showed that pathogen richness was negatively correlated with fine root diameter but was positively correlated with specific root length for the AM-associated species, while for the ECM-associated species, the pathogen richness was only found to have a significant negative relationship with the relative abundance of ECM fungi. These findings highlight the difference between AM- and ECM-associated species in pathogen defence and bridge the gap between root traits and pathogen richness, which is significant for improving our understanding of the potential factors mediating the strength of PSF and thus maintaining tree species diversity.

opencc-by-4.0Aug 2022View details →

The planted XY model: thermodynamics and inference

Data and codes for figures in manuscript "The planted XY model: thermodynamics and inference"

Plant species richness on the Tibetan Plateau: Patterns and determinants

Whether current hypotheses for geographic patterns of species richness (SR) have a strong explanatory power for the Tibetan Plateau (TP) with extreme climatic conditions remains unclear. In comparison with the classic "water–energy dynamics hypothesis", the unique climate factors (e.g., extreme low temperature and low oxygen partial pressure) on the TP likely significantly affect the spatial variation of SR. Here, we investigate geographic patterns and determinants of SR on the TP through a systematic field investigation. We systematically analyzed a total of 2,013 plant communities covering 11 different vegetation types on the TP. The SR per 400 m2 in the forests and shrubs and that per 1 m2 in alpine grasslands and deserts was 62.76 (±1.80 SE), 44.53 (±7.57 SE), 16.84 (±0.39 SE), and 3.62 (±0.55 SE), respectively. Unique climate factors, such as extremely low temperature, mean diurnal temperature, and oxygen partial pressure, act synergistically with water–energy dynamics and influence the spatial pattern of SR on the TP. Our findings provide novel insights into the mechanisms underlying the spatial variation in plant diversity, especially on plateaus and in high-latitude regions. Our findings and the SR map with 1 km resolution provide important benchmarks for biodiversity conservation and may help to improve predictions of the effect of climate change on biodiversity.

Data from: ETIB-T: An aquilibrium theory of island biogeography for plant traits

This dataset holds information on community mean seed mass, plant height and leaf area of 156 species and their occurrences on 15 islands ranging in size from 164 m2 - 19 km2. The islands are located in Western Australia off Perth. Further, the dataset provides information on island coordinates, size, isolation and elevation. The islands were sampled four times within four decades. The data can be used to investigate spatial and temporal turnover dynamics on islands.

Niche partitioning overrides interspecific competition to determine plant species distributions along a nutrient gradient

Changes in some combination of niche availability, niche overlap and the strength of interspecific interactions are thought to drive changes in plant composition along resource gradients. However, because these processes are difficult to measure in the field, their relative importance in driving compositional change in plant communities remains unclear. In an Australian temperate grassland, we added seeds of three native and three exotic grasses to 1,875 experimental plots in a way that allowed us to simultaneously estimate niche availability, niche overlap and the strength of pairwise interspecific interactions along a gradient of nutrient availability, obtained by adding 0, 5 or 20 g/m2 each of nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium jointly to plots. Niche availability (the proportion of microsites suitable for establishment and growth) was generally low and did not vary in response to nutrient addition. Most species co-occurred along the nutrient gradient by partitioning the available niche space. Where species interacted due to niche overlap, the abundance of one species, the native Chloris truncata, was usually facilitated by other species, with each of the five other species increasing the niche availability to C. truncata under at least one nutrient treatment. Chloris truncata also competitively excluded two species from some but not all sites they could otherwise have occupied. These outcomes did not clearly differ across nutrient treatments. Our results show that fine-scale spatial heterogeneity in establishment microsites can enable species to co-occur via niche partitioning, and competitive exclusion is rare. This finding contributes to an emerging picture that niche partitioning is common and frequently a stronger influence on recruitment outcomes than interspecific competition. The importance of competition in structuring plant communities may be overestimated if recruitment processes are overlooked.

Mycorrhizae influence plant vegetative and floral traits and intraspecific trait variation

Premise. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can strongly influence host plant vegetative growth, but less is known about AMF effects on other plant traits, the relative impacts of AMF on vegetative growth versus floral traits, or AMF-induced intraspecific variation in traits. Key results. AMF species varied in their effects on host plants, from negative to positive effects. AMF often had inconsistent effects on vegetative biomass versus floral traits, and therefore quantifying one or the other may provide a misleading representation of potential AMF effects. AMF treatments generated key variation in plant traits, especially floral traits, with potential consequences for plant-pollinator interactions. Given increased intraspecific trait variation in Linum lewisii plants across AMF species compared to uninoculated individuals or single AMF treatments, local AMF diversity and their host plant associations may scale up to influence community-wide patterns of trait variation and species interactions. Conclusions. These results have implications for predicting how aboveground communities are affected by belowground communities. Including AMF effects on not just host plant biomass but also functional traits and trait variation will deepen our understanding of community structure and function, including pollination.

Data from: Quantitative plant taphonomy: the cosmopolitan Mesozoic fern Weichselia reticulata as a case study

A quantitative approach to plant taphonomy focusing on preservation type and fragment size is tested by comparing 3338 Weichselia reticulata fragments from 25 Lower Cretaceous localities of different ages and depositional environments. Moreover, palaeobiological insights are also obtained from the taphonomic analyses. In the case of the specimens of Weichselia reticulata included in this work, charred remains are the most frequent preservation type. They are the smallest and most homogeneous in size, probably due to the fragmentation of the fronds while burning and to the fact that burnt fragments are more fragile and break easily during the initial abrasion and attrition produced by transport. The sizes of charred fragments vary depending on the depositional environment, suggesting that biostratinomic processes, and not fire temperature, are the main cause for size differences, and providing valuable insight into the distance the remains might have traveled from production to final deposition. The taphonomic analyses suggest that Weichselia reticulata is allochthonous in all the localities analysed, and that its habitat would have been prone to fire and not far from freshwater systems. This case study shows promising results that can be implemented on different plant groups and chronostratigraphic ages, allowing for the proposal of a taphonomic model.

Plant secondary metabolic responses to global climate change: A meta-analysis in medicinal and aromatic plants

Plant secondary metabolites (SMs) play crucial roles in plant-environment interactions and contribute greatly to human health. Global climate changes are expected to dramatically affect plant secondary metabolism, yet a systematic understanding of such influences is still lacking. Here, we employed medicinal and aromatic plants (MAAPs) as model plant taxa and performed a meta-analysis from 360 publications using 1828 paired observations to assess the responses of different SMs levels and the accompanying plant traits to elevated carbon dioxide (eCO2), elevated temperature (eT), elevated nitrogen deposition (eN), and decreased precipitation (dP). The overall results showed that phenolic and terpenoid levels generally respond positively to eCO2 but negatively to eN, while the total alkaloid concentration was increased remarkably by eN. By contrast, dP promotes the levels of all SMs, while eT exclusively exerts a positive influence on the levels of phenolic compounds. Further analysis highlighted the dependence of SM responses on different moderators such as plant functional types, climate change levels or exposure durations, mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation. Moreover, plant phenolic and terpenoid responses to climate changes could be attributed to the variations in C/N ratio and total soluble sugar levels, while the trade-off supposition contributed to SM responses to climate changes other than eCO2. Taken together, our results predicted the distinctive SM responses to diverse climate changes in MAAPs, and allowed us to define potential moderators responsible for these variations. Further, linking SM responses to C-N metabolism and growth-defence balance provided biological understandings in terms of plant secondary metabolic regulation.