Agricultural land use imposes a major disturbance on ecosystems worldwide, thus greatly modifying the taxonomic and functional composition of plant communities. However, mechanisms of community assembly, as assessed by plant functional traits, are not well known for dryland ecosystems under agricultural disturbance. Here we investigated trait responses to disturbance intensity and availability ...

Wildflower mixes are often planted around field margins to provide forage for pollinators. Although seed for these mixtures is often wild-sourced, for species where agricultural cultivars are available, for example red clover (Trifolium pratense), cultivars can also be included. Previous evidence suggests that plant genetic background can have a strong influence on plant-arthropod interactions ...

Now days, turf management has encountered with water deficit, mostly due to low precipitation also industrial, agricultural and household demand and consumption. So, the objective of this project was to identify drought tolerance of warm and cool season turfgrass cultivars to different levels of regulated-deficit irrigation. The field experiment was set out in a split-plot based on completely r...

In the current paper we investigate whether gender aVects the encoding of leadership behavior. In three studies we found evidence that perceivers had diYculty encoding leadership behaviors into their underlying prototypical leadership traits when the behavior implied an agentic trait and the behavior was enacted by a female. Using a lexical decision making task, in Study 1 we demonstrated that ...

Given finite resources, intense investment in one life history trait is expected to reduce investment in others. Although telomere length appears to be strongly tied to age in many taxa, telomere maintenance requires energy. We therefore hypothesize that telomere maintenance may trade off against other life history characters. We used natural variation in laboratory populations of Atlantic silv...

Genetic drift and selection are ubiquitous evolutionary forces acting to shape genetic variation in populations. While their relative importance has been well studied in plants and animals, less is known about their relative importance in fungal pathogens. Because agro-ecosystems are more homogeneous environments than natural ecosystems, stabilizing selection may play a stronger role than genet...

Fabaceae species play a key role in ecosystem functioning through their capacity to fix atmospheric nitrogen via their symbiosis with Rhizobium bacteria. To increase benefits of using Fabaceae in agricultural systems, it is necessary to find ways to evaluate species or genotypes having potential adaptations to sub-optimal growth conditions. We evaluated the relevance of phylogenetic distance, a...