Johanne Gresse, University of Tübingen, discusses her article: Drought resistance drives population temporal stability of annuals in drylands Imagine a desert after rain. For a few brief weeks, the ground bursts into a colourful carpet of annual plants. At first glance, this display seems fleeting and fragile. But when observed over many years, a pattern…
Barbara Meyers, University of Freiburg in Germany, discusses her article: Soil nutrient availability rather than spatial nutrient heterogeneity shapes the intraspecific response of root architectural, morphological and mycorrhizal traits in Vaccinium myrtillus Roots make up for a large proportion of plant biomass and play a central role in several plant functions: accessing water and nutrients…
Anna Derkacheva, Gerald “JJ” Frost, Howie Epstein, and Ksenia Ermokhina, of HSE University in Russia, Alaska Biological Research, Inc., the University of Virginia, and the Russian Academy of Sciences (respectively), discuss their article: Landscape patterns of shrubification in the Siberian low arctic: A machine learning perspective The Arctic tundra is experiencing some of the strongest…
Riccardo Ciarle, Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, discusses his article: Ancestral state reconstruction sheds new light on the loss of divarication hypothesis on New Zealand’s outlying islands The background If you step into the New Zealand bush, the first thing you’ll see will be towering podocarps, lofty tree ferns, and a wide…
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…
The cover image for our August issue shows a female sharp-collared furrow bee visiting the flowers of a Mediterranean shrub. This image relates to the research article: Individual-based plant–pollinator networks are structured by phenotypic and microsite plant traits by Arroyo-Correa, Bartomeus, & Jordano. Lead author, Blanca Arroyo-Correa, and photographer, Curro Molina, discuss the biodiversity of Doñana National Park and…
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