The cultivation of cocoa is a commodity great importance worldwide. In Mexico, grown in Tabasco and Chiapas states agroforestry systems since pre-Hispanic times, where under the canopy shade trees. Crops such as sugarcane extensive livestock production have gradually reduced area devoted to region. Yet, farmers keep small portions maintain local floristic diversity. This practice seems be succe...

The only fully coupled land-atmosphere global climate model predicts a widespread dieback of Amazonian forest cover through reduced precipitation. Although these predictions are controversial, the structural and compositional resilience of Amazonian forests may also have been overestimated, as current vegetation models fail to consider the potential role of fire in the degradation of forest eco...

The increasing demand for healthy edible oil has generated the need to identify promising oil crops. Tree peony (Paeonia section Moutan DC.) is a woody oil crop with α-linolenic acid (ALA) contributing for 45% of the total fatty acid (FA) content in seeds. Molecular and genetic differences that contribute to varied FA content and composition among the wild peony species are, however, poorly und...

Predicting plant community responses to changing environmental conditions is a key element of forecasting and mitigating the effects of global change. Disturbance can play an important role in these dynamics, by initiating cycles of secondary succession and generating opportunities for communities of long-lived organisms to reorganize in alternative configurations. This study used landscape-sca...

In molecular phylogenetics, standard models of sequence evolution generally assume that sequence composition remains constant over evolutionary time. However, this assumption is violated in many datasets which show substantial heterogeneity in sequence composition across taxa. We propose a model which allows compositional heterogeneity across branches, and formulate the model in a Bayesian fram...