Soil ecologists have debated the relative importance of dispersal limitation and ecological factors in determining the structure of soil microbial communities. Recent evidence suggests that 'everything is not everywhere', and that microbial communities are influenced by both dispersal limitation and ecological factors. However, we still do not understand the relative explanatory power of spatia...

We lack both a theoretical framework and solid empirical data to understand domestication impacts on plant chemistry. We hypothesised that domestication increased leaf N and P to support high plant production rates, but biogeographic and climate patterns further influenced the magnitude and direction of changes in specific aspects of chemistry and stoichiometry. To test these hypotheses, we use...

Plants are systemically relevant to our planet not only by constituting a major part of its biomass, but also because they produce vast diversity bioactive phytochemicals. These compounds often modulate interactions between plants and the environment, can have substantial effects on plant consumers their health. By taking food web perspective, we highlight role phytochemicals in linking soils, ...

This work aims to summarize the results of research carried out by Brazilian researchers on the plant communities of Antarctic ice free areas during the last twenty five years. Since 1988 field work has been carried out in Elephant Island, King George Island, Nelson Island and Deception Island. During this period six papers were published on the chemistry of lichens, seven papers on plant taxon...

Host plant identity and host plant chemistry have often been shown to influence host finding and acceptance by natural enemies but comparatively less attention has been paid to the tritrophic effects of host plant and host plant chemistry on other natural enemy fitness correlates, such as survivorship, clutch size, body size, and sex ratio. Such studies are central to understanding both the sel...

Local adaptation is central for creating and maintaining spatial variation in plant-herbivore interactions. Short-lived insect herbivores feeding on long-lived plants are likely to adapt to their local host plants, because of their short generation time, poor dispersal, and geographically varying selection due to variation in plant defences. In a reciprocal feeding trial, we investigated the im...

Plant secondary chemistry is now a paradigmatic example of adaptation. However, more than 120 years ago (70 years before the oft-cited works of Fraenkel or Ehrlich and Raven ignited the field of chemical ecology), a female scientist named Helen Cecilia de Silver Abbott (1857–1904) published an article in The American Naturalist introducing the radical idea that plant chemistry should be conside...