Festuca rubra subsp. pruinosa is a grass that grows on coastal cliffs along the Atlantic coast of Europe. Asymptomatic plants of this species are systemically infected by the fungal endophyte Epichloë festucae. It is not known whether the alkaloids ergovaline and peramine are produced by the endophyte in Festuca rubra subsp. pruinosa. Plants from four populations were collected from the norther...

Coal fly ash dumps represent contaminated sites that pollute the environment and affect the health of living organisms. Vegetation development at ash dumps is an ecological solution to minimize the environmental threats of ash; however, low content of nutrients, organic matter and moisture pose a challenge for plant growth at the dumps. Bacterial indole acetic acid (IAA) facilitates plant recru...

Ant-plant associations are an outstanding model to study the entangled ecological interactions that structure communities. However, most studies of plant-animal networks focus on only one type of resource that mediates these interactions (e.g, nectar or fruits), leading to a biased understanding of community structure. New approaches, however, have made possible to study several interaction typ...

Species diversity in large herbivore communities is often explained by niche segregation allowed by differences in body mass and digestive morphophysiological features. Based on large number of gut samples in fall and winter, we analysed the temporal dynamics of diet composition, quality and interspecific overlap of 4 coexisting mountain herbivores. We tested whether the relative consumption of...

The present study was conducted in 47 different riparian areas distributed throughout Denmark to investigate diversity and distributional patterns of plant communities along a lowland stream size gradient (first to fifth order). The investigated areas were representative for Danish riparian areas not in use for agricultural production. We investigated plant community richness along a stream siz...

This paper seeks to contribute to longstanding but recently revived debates about the nature of the branch plant economy in the UK regions. It introduces new empirical evidence on the ‘quality’ of MNE plants in Yorkshire and Humberside and Northern Ireland. Plant quality in both regions is shown to be more variable than might be expected on the basis of the branch plant stereotype, with a subst...

Quantification of the fate of carbon (C) used by plant metabolism is necessary to improve predictions of terrestrial ecosystem respiration and its sources. Here, a dual isotope ((13)C and (14)C) pulse-label was used to determine the allocation of new C to different respiratory pathways in the early and late growing seasons for two plant functional types, perennial grasses and shrubs, in the Owe...

Abstract Understanding metal plant availability as influenced by soil conditions is of key importance for phytoremediation research and for quantification of environmental risk assessment in polluted areas. Urtica dioica L. was chosen as study object as it is omnipresent in the temperate climate region and in the area under study in particular. The study area stretched over 630 km2 in Flanders,...