A global Fine‐Root Ecology Database to address below‐ground challenges in plant ecology

A global Fine-Root Ecology Database to address below-ground challenges in plant ecology.

Variation and tradeoffs within and among plant traits are increasingly being harnessed by empiricists and modelers to understand and predict ecosystem processes under changing environmental conditions. While fine roots play an important role in ecosystem functioning, fine-root traits are underrepresented in global trait databases. This has hindered efforts to analyze fine-root trait variation a...

The Grand Challenges in Functional Plant Ecology

The science, this section-journal of Frontiers in Plant Sciences will be covering at great breadth and depth, aims at linking plant responses with the environment. The environmental influences are manifold and include both abiotic and biotic ones. The first include physical and chemical influences, the latter include plant–plant, plant–animal, plant–microbe (incl. virus) interactions. The plant...

A temporal approach to linking aboveground and belowground ecology.

Ecologists are becoming increasingly aware of the role of aboveground-belowground relationships in controlling ecosystem processes and properties. Here, we review recent studies that show that relationships between aboveground and belowground communities operate over a hierarchy of temporal scales, ranging from days to seasons, to millennia, with differing consequences for ecosystem structure a...

Microarray challenges in ecology.

Microarrays are used to measure simultaneously the amount of mRNAs transcribed from many genes. They were originally designed for gene expression profiling in relatively simple biological systems, such as cell lines and model systems under constant laboratory conditions. This poses a challenge to ecologists who increasingly want to use microarrays to unravel the genetic mechanisms underlying co...

Addressing global environmental challenges from a peace ecology perspective.