Assembly history, including the order in which species arrive into a community, can infl uence long-term community structure; however we know less about how timing of species arrival may alter assembly especially under varying resource conditions. To explore how the timing of species arrival interacts with resource availability to alter community assembly, we constructed experimental plant comm...

Theory predicts, and recent empirical studies have shown, that the diversity of plant species determines the diversity of associated herbivores and mediates ecosystem processes, such as aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP). However, an often-overlooked component of plant diversity, namely population genotypic diversity, may also have wide-ranging effects on community structure and ecosys...

Although we understand the ecological processes eliciting changes in plant community composition during secondary succession, we do not understand whether co-occurring changes in plant detritus shape saprotrophic microbial communities in soil. In this study, we investigated soil microbial composition and function across an old-field chronosequence ranging from 16 to 86 years following agricultu...

Soil bacteria play a key role in the ecological and evolutionary responses of agricultural ecosystems. Domestic herbivore grazing is known to influence soil bacterial community. However, the effects of grazing and its major driving factors on soil bacterial community remain unknown for different plant community compositions under increasing grazing intensity. Thus, to investigate soil bacterial...

Plant nitrogen (N) use strategies have great implications for primary production and ecosystem nutrient cycling. Given the increasing atmospheric N deposition received by most of the terrestrial ecosystems, understanding the responses of plant N use would facilitate the projection of plant-mediated N cycling under global change scenarios. The effects of N deposition on plant N use would be affe...

Exploring the link between above- and belowground biodiversity has been a major theme of recent ecological research, due in large part to the increasingly well-recognized role that soil microorganisms play in driving plant community processes. In this study, we utilized a field-based tree experiment in Minnesota, USA, to assess the effect of changes in plant species richness and phylogenetic di...

BACKGROUND While the demand for health services keep escalating at the grass roots or rural areas of China, a substantial portion of healthcare resources remain stagnant in the more developed cities and this has entrenched health inequity in many parts of China. At its conception, China's Deepen Medical Reform started in 2012 was intended to flush out possible disparities and promote a more equ...

The importance of intraspecific variation has emerged as a key question in community ecology, helping to bridge the gap between ecology and evolution. Although much of this work has focused on plant species, recent syntheses have highlighted the prevalence and potential importance of morphological, behavioral, and life history variation within animals for ecological and evolutionary processes. ...

Differences in species' abilities to capture resources can drive competitive hierarchies, successional dynamics, community diversity, and invasions. To investigate mechanisms of resource competition within a nitrogen (N) limited California grassland community, we established a manipulative experiment using an R* framework. R* theory holds that better competitors within a N limited community sho...

0 In this study the potential role of competition in in~uencing the distribution of three displaced native perennial grasses across complex gradients of plant productivity and species composition was investigated in Michigan old!_elds[ To do this plant removal and propagule addition experiments were conducted at nine old!_eld sites to examine the e}ects of living plant neighbours and litter on ...