Plant–plant interactions: from competition to facilitation

From Competition to Facilitation: Mechanisms of Species Interactions in a Novel World

Competition and Facilitation: a Synthetic Approach to Interactions in Plant Communities

Interactions among organisms take place within a complex milieu of abiotic and biotic processes, but we generally study them as solitary phenomena. Complex combinations of negative and positive interactions have been identified in a number of plant communities. The importance of these two processes in structuring plant communities can best be understood by comparing them along gradients of abio...

Research supervision styles in Iranian academia: from facilitation to exploitation!

number of postgraduate students has been growing exponentially in Iran in the last two decades. That is while the number of faculty has not increased proportionally to keep up with the fast growth. Hence, the student-faculty ratio has widened, turning thesis and dissertations into chaotic scene. Accordingly, this paper aims at uncovering how Iranian professors supervise postgraduate research pr...

Environmental stress, facilitation, competition, and coexistence.

The major theories regarding the combined influence of the environment and species interactions on population and community dynamics appear to conflict. Stress/ disturbance gradient models of community organization, such as the stress gradient hypothesis, emphasize a diminished role for competition in harsh environments whereas modern coexistence theory does not. Confusion about the role of spe...

Field manipulations of resources mediate the transition from intraspecific competition to facilitation.

Population density affects individual performance, though its effects are often mixed. For sessile species, increases in population density typically reduce performance. Still, cases of positive density-dependence do occur in sessile systems and demand explanation. The stress gradient hypothesis (SGH) predicts that under stressful conditions, positive effects of facilitation may outweigh the ne...