Invasive plants often have novel biotic interactions in their introduced ranges. Their defense to herbivory may differ from their native counterparts, potentially influencing the effectiveness of biological control. If invasive plants have decreased resistance but increased tolerance to enemies, insect herbivores may rapidly build up their populations but exert weak control. Moreover, resource ...

1. Native, wild bees are important pollinators for both crop and wild plants. With concerns over the availability and cost of managed honeybees, attention has turned to native, wild bees as crop pollinators. However, the ability of native, wild bees to provide sufficient pollination may depend on their populations at local scales. 2. Therefore, at the farm scale, we examined the pollination con...

This study focuses on the identification of grammatical structures that could serve as indices of the grammatical ability of non-native speakers of English. We obtain parse trees of manually transcribed non-native spoken responses using a statistical constituency parser and evaluate its performance on noisy sentences. We then use the parse trees to identify the grammatical structures of the Ind...

Surface mining in Appalachia disrupts large areas of forested land. Federal and state laws require disturbed lands be reclaimed by re-constructing the landscape and replacing soil materials to provide a rooting medium. If insufficient quantities of native topsoil are available, substitute materials derived from the overburden may be used as soil media. This study examined soil and foliar nutrie...

Disruption of species interactions is a key issue in climate change biology. Interactions involving forest trees may be particularly vulnerable due to evolutionary rate limitations imposed by long generation times. One mitigation strategy for such impacts is Climate matching - the augmentation of local native tree populations by input from nonlocal populations currently experiencing predicted f...

Exotic Xylosandrus spp. ambrosia beetles established in non-native habitats have been associated with sudden and extensive attacks on a diverse range of living trees, but factors driving their shift from dying/dead hosts to living and healthy ones are not well understood. We sought to characterize the role of host physiological condition on preference and colonization by two invaders, Xylosandr...

Tropical canopies are known for their high abundance and diversity of ants. However, the factors which enable coexistence of so many species in trees, and in particular, the role of foragers in determining local diversity, are not well understood. We censused nesting and foraging arboreal ant communities in two 0.32 ha plots of primary and secondary lowland rainforest in New Guinea and explored...

1 Herbivores may negatively impact plant populations by reducing the survival, growth and reproduction of individual plants. 2 In African savannas, browsing by large mammalian herbivores has been shown repeatedly to reduce adult survival and growth of members of the genus Acacia , the dominant trees in these systems. However, the potential costs of mammalian herbivory to Acacia reproduction are...