The woody plant takeover: encroaching shrubs show diverse growth strategies in a tallgrass prairie

Emily Wedel, from Kansas State University’s Konza Prairie Biological Station, describes her article: Divergent resource-use strategies of encroaching shrubs: Can traits predict encroachment success in tallgrass prairie? Background: Attack of the shrubs The expansive grasslands that once dominated North America’s Central Great Plains have all but disappeared. The remaining grass-dominated regions that avoided conversion to…

Unraveling the Complex Interactions in Tallgrass Prairie Ecosystems

Eric Duell, from the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research, discusses his article: ‘Mycorrhizal-herbivore interactions and the competitive release of subdominant tallgrass prairie species‘ Tallgrass prairies of central and eastern North America are characterized by diverse plant communities consisting of grasses and forbs (often called wildflowers or broadleaves) which possess a variety of…

Editor’s Choice: Elegance in simplicity – a useful new way to quantify plant diversity dynamics

The Editor’s Choice article for Volume 107 Issue 5 is a study by Zhang et al., which outlines their new SRUD approach for measuring plant diversity dynamics. Associate Editor, Hans Cornelissen, discusses the importance of this new method. Many thousands of researchers have been concerned with what drives and threatens biodiversity. They have investigated whether biodiversity provides benefits…