Journal ArticleDOI
Herbivores promote habitat specialization by trees in Amazonian forests.
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TLDR
Habitat specialization in this system results from an interaction of herbivore pressure with soil type when protected from herbivores.Abstract:
In an edaphically heterogeneous area in the Peruvian Amazon, clay soils and nutrient-poor white sands each harbor distinctive plant communities. To determine whether a trade-off between growth and antiherbivore defense enforces habitat specialization on these two soil types, we conducted a reciprocal transplant study of seedlings of 20 species from six genera of phylogenetically independent pairs of edaphic specialist trees and manipulated the presence of herbivores. Clay specialist species grew significantly faster than white-sand specialists in both soil types when protected from herbivores. However, when unprotected, white-sand specialists dominated in white-sand forests and clay specialists dominated in clay forests. Therefore, habitat specialization in this system results from an interaction of herbivore pressure with soil type.read more
Citations
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The merging of community ecology and phylogenetic biology
TL;DR: Several key areas are reviewed in which phylogenetic information helps to resolve long-standing controversies in community ecology, challenges previous assumptions, and opens new areas of investigation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Functional traits and niche-based tree community assembly in an Amazonian forest
TL;DR: This work examines the co-occurrence patterns of over 1100 tree species in a 25-hectare Amazonian forest plot in relation to field-measured functional traits and finds evidence for processes that simultaneously drive convergence and divergence in key aspects of plant strategy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Plant defense syndromes.
Anurag Agrawal,Mark Fishbein +1 more
TL;DR: The discovery of convergent plant defense syndromes can be used as a framework to ask questions about how abiotic environments, communities of herbivores, and biogeography are associated with particular defense strategies of plants.
Journal ArticleDOI
Functional trait and phylogenetic tests of community assembly across spatial scales in an Amazonian forest
TL;DR: The authors applied trait and phylogenetic methods to the Yasuni Forest Dynamics Plot, a 25-ha Amazonian forest with >1100 tree species, and found evidence for habitat filtering from both trait-and phylogenetic-based methods from small (25 m2) to intermediate (10
Journal ArticleDOI
Herbivory: effects on plant abundance, distribution and population growth.
John L. Maron,Elizabeth E. Crone +1 more
TL;DR: It is found larger effects of consumers on grassland than woodland forbs, stronger effects of herbivory in areas with high versus low disturbance, but no systematic or unambiguous differences in the impact of consumers based on plant life-history or herbivore feeding mode.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Resource Availability and Plant Antiherbivore Defense
TL;DR: Resource availability in the environment is proposed as the major determinant of both the amount and type of plant defense, and theories on the evolution of plant defenses are compared with other theories.
Book
Geographic variation, speciation, and clines
TL;DR: Professor Endler shows how geographic differentiation and speciation may develop in spite of continuous gene flow, and considers the interpretation of natural clines and the associated geographic patterns of subspecies and species.
Journal ArticleDOI
Phylogenetics of seed plants: an analysis of nucleotide sequences from the plastid gene rbcL.
TL;DR: Two exploratory parsimony analyses of DNA sequences from 475 and 499 species of seed plants, respectively, representing all major taxonomic groups indicate that rbcL sequence variation contains historical evidence appropriate for phylogenetic analysis at this taxonomic level of sampling.