Positive plant interactions and community dynamics

Editorial: Grassland-Invertebrate Interactions: Plant Productivity, Resilience and Community Dynamics

Grassroots Ecology: Plant-Microbe-Soil Interactions as Drivers of Plant Community Structure and Dynamics Author(s):

A growing body of research on plant-microbe interactions in soil is contributing to the development of a new, microbially based perspective on plant community ecology. Soil-dwelling microorganisms are diverse, and interactions with plants vary with respect to specificity, environmental heterogeneity, and fitness impact. Two microbial processes that may exert key influences on plant community st...

Global change and terrestrial plant community dynamics.

Anthropogenic drivers of global change include rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses and resulting changes in the climate, as well as nitrogen deposition, biotic invasions, altered disturbance regimes, and land-use change. Predicting the effects of global change on terrestrial plant communities is crucial because of the ecosystem services vegetation pro...

Rank clocks and plant community dynamics.

Summarizing complex temporal dynamics in communities is difficult to achieve in a way that yields an intuitive picture of change. Rank clocks and rank abundance statistics provide a graphical and analytical framework for displaying and quantifying community dynamics. We used rank clocks, in which the rank order abundance for each species is plotted over time in temporal clockwise direction, to ...

Positive interactions between herbivores and plant diversity shape forest regeneration.

The effects of herbivores and diversity on plant communities have been studied separately but rarely in combination. We conducted two concurrent experiments over 3 years to examine how tree seedling diversity, density and herbivory affected forest regeneration. One experiment factorially manipulated plant diversity (one versus 15 species) and the presence/absence of deer (Odocoileus virginianus...