Do Ground-Dwelling Vertebrates Promote Diversity in a Neotropical Forest? Results from a Long-Term Exclosure Experiment

Do Ground-Dwelling Vertebrates Promote Diversity in a Neotropical Forest? Results from a Long-Term Exclosure Experiment.

Using a decade-long exclosure experiment in Panama, we tested the hypothesis that ground-dwelling vertebrate herbivores and seed predators are crucial determinants of tropical tree diversity and abundance within the understory. Our exclosure experiment is a community-level test of the Janzen-Connell hypothesis. Therefore, we predicted that vertebrate exclusion would (a) increase plant densities...

Terrestrial vertebrates promote arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal diversity and inoculum potential in a rain forest soil

Catherine A. Gehring,* Julie E. Wolf and Tad C. Theimer Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 860115640, USA Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia *Correspondence: E-mail: catherine.gehring@ nau.edu Abstract We examined whether terrestrial vertebrates affected the arbuscular mycorrhizal funga...

Diversity and productivity in a long-term grassland experiment.

Plant diversity and niche complementarity had progressively stronger effects on ecosystem functioning during a 7-year experiment, with 16-species plots attaining 2.7 times greater biomass than monocultures. Diversity effects were neither transients nor explained solely by a few productive or unviable species. Rather, many higher-diversity plots outperformed the best monoculture. These results h...

Diversity-function relationships changed in a long-term restoration experiment.

The central tenet of biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) theory, that species richness increases function, could motivate restoration practitioners to incorporate a greater number of species into their projects. But it is not yet clear how well BEF theory predicts outcomes of restoration, because it has been developed through tests involving short-run and tightly controlled (e.g., weeded) exp...

Short-Term Dynamics of a Neotropical Forest