New articles accepted from the lab



Three new papers from the lab have been accepted during the last weeks. They will be published online early during the next weeks/months, but here go the abstracts:

Soliveres, S., C. Smit & F. T. Maestre. 2014. Moving forward on facilitation research: response to changing environments and effects on the diversity, functioning and evolution of plant communities. Biological Reviews 

Once seen as anomalous, facilitative interactions among plants and their importance for community structure and functioning are now widely recognized. The growing body of modeling, descriptive and experimental studies on facilitation covers a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic systems throughout the globe. However, the lack of a general body of theory linking facilitation among different types of organisms and biomes and their responses to environmental changes prevents further advancements in our knowledge regarding the evolutionary and ecological implications of facilitation in plant communities. Moreover, insights gathered from alternative lines of inquiry may substantially improve our understanding of facilitation, but these have been largely neglected thus far. 
Despite over 15 years of research and debate on this topic, there is no consensus on to what degree plant-plant interactions predictably change along environmental gradients (i.e., the stress gradient hypothesis), and this hinders our ability to predict how plant-plant interactions may affect the response of plant communities to ongoing global environmental change. The existing controversies regarding the response of plant-plant interactions across environmental gradients can be reconciled when clearly considering and determining the species-specificity of the response, the functional or individual stress type, and the scale of interest (pairwise interactions or community level response). Here we introduce a theoretical framework that does that, and provide multiple empirical evidences supporting it. We also discuss current gaps in our knowledge regarding how plant-plant interactions change along environmental gradients. These include the existence of thresholds in the amount of species-specific stress that a benefactor can alleviate, the linearity or non-linearity of the response of pairwise interactions across distance from the ecological optimum of the beneficiary, and the need to further explore how frequent interactions among multiple species are and how they change across different environments. We review the latest advances in these topics and provide new approaches to fill current gaps in our knowledge.
We also apply our theoretical framework to advance our knowledge on the evolutionary aspects of plant facilitation, and the relative importance of facilitation, in comparison with other ecological processes, for maintaining ecosystem structure, functioning and dynamics. We build links between these topics and related fields, such as ecological restoration, woody encroachment, invasion ecology, ecological modeling and biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships. By identifying commonalities and insights from alternative lines of research, we further advance our understanding of facilitation and provide testable hypotheses regarding the role of (positive) biotic interactions in the maintenance of biodiversity and the response of ecological communities to ongoing environmental changes.

Soliveres, S. & F. T. Maestre. 2014. Plant-plant interactions, environmental gradients and plant diversity: a global synthesis of community-level studies. Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics  


Previous syntheses on the effects of environmental conditions on the outcome of plant-plant interactions summarize results from pairwise studies. However, the upscaling to the community-level of such studies is problematic because of the existence of multiple species assemblages and species-specific responses to both the environmental conditions and the presence of neighbors. We conducted the first global synthesis of community-level studies from harsh environments, which included data from 71 alpine and 137 dryland communities to: i) test how important are facilitative interactions as a driver of community structure, ii) evaluate whether we can predict the frequency of positive plant-plant interactions across differing environmental conditions and habitats, and iii) assess whether thresholds in the response of plant-plant interactions to environmental gradients exists between "moderate" and "extreme" environments. We also used those community-level studies performed across gradients of at least three points to evaluate how the average environmental conditions, the length of the gradient studied, and the number of points sampled across such gradient affect the form and strength of the facilitation-environmental conditions relationship. Over 25% of the species present were more spatially associated to nurse plants than expected by chance in both alpine and dryland areas, illustrating the high importance of positive plant-plant interactions for the maintenance of plant diversity in these environments. Facilitative interactions were more frequent, and more related to environmental conditions, in alpine than in dryland areas, perhaps because drylands are generally characterized by a larger variety of environmental stress factors and plant functional traits. The frequency of facilitative interactions in alpine communities peaked at 1000 mm of annual rainfall, and globally decreased with elevation. The frequency of positive interactions in dryland communities decreased globally with water scarcity or temperature annual range. Positive facilitation-drought stress relationships are more likely in shorter regional gradients, but these relationships are obscured in regions with a greater species turnover or with complex environmental gradients. By showing the different climatic drivers and behaviors of plant-plant interactions in dryland and alpine areas, our results will improve predictions regarding the effect of facilitation on the assembly of plant communities and their response to changes in environmental conditions.

Vicca, S., M. Bahn, M. Estiarte, G. Alberti, P. Ambus, A. Arain, C. Beer, C. Beier, W. Borken, N. Buchmann, S. L. Collins, A. Costa, G. De Dato, J. S. Dukes, C. Escolar, P. Fay, G. Guidolotti, P. Hanson, A. Kahmen, G. Kroël-Dulay, T. Ladreiter-Knauss, K. Larsen, E. Lellei-Kovacs, E. Lebrija-Trejos, F. T. Maestre, S. Marhan, M. Marshall, P. Meir, P. Miao, J. Muhr, P. A. Niklaus, R. Ogaya, L. Y. Patrick, J. Peñuelas, C. Poll, L. Rustad, K. Savage, A. Schindlbacher, I. K. Schmidt, A. Smith, E. Sotta, V. Suseela, A. Tietema, N. Y. van Gestel, E. E. van Loon, O. van Straaten, R. Vargas, S. Wan, U. Weber & I. A. Janssens. Can current moisture responses of soil respiration be extrapolated into the future? A synthesis of precipitation manipulation experiments. Biogeosciences

As a key component of the carbon cycle, soil CO2 efflux (SCE) is being increasingly studied to improve our mechanistic understanding of this important carbon flux. Predicting ecosystem responses to climate change often depends on extrapolation of current relationships between ecosystem processes and their climatic drivers to conditions not yet experienced by the ecosystem. This raises the question to what extent these relationships remain unaltered beyond the current climatic window for which observations are available to constrain the relationships. Here, we evaluate whether current responses of SCE to fluctuations in soil temperature and soil water content can be used to predict SCE under altered rainfall patterns. Of the 58 experiments for which we gathered SCE data, 20 were discarded because either too few data were available, or inconsistencies precluded their incorporation in the analyses. The 38 remaining experiments were used to test the hypothesis that a model parameterized with data from the control plots (using soil temperature and water content as predictor variables) could adequately predict SCE measured in the manipulated treatment. Only for seven of these 38 experiments, this hypothesis was rejected. Importantly, these were the experiments with the most reliable datasets, i.e., those providing high-frequency measurements of SCE. Accordingly, regression tree analysis demonstrated that measurement frequency was crucial; our hypothesis could be rejected only for experiments with measurement intervals of less than 11 days, and was not rejected for any of the 24 experiments with larger measurement intervals. This highlights the importance of high-frequency measurements when studying effects of altered precipitation on SCE, probably because infrequent measurement schemes have insufficient capacity to detect shifts in the climate-dependencies of SCE. We strongly recommend that future experiments focus more strongly on establishing response functions across a broader range of precipitation regimes and soil moisture conditions. Such experiments should make accurate measurements of water availability, they require high-frequency SCE measurements and they should consider both instantaneous responses and the potential legacy effects of climate extremes. This is important, because we demonstrated that at least for some ecosystems, current moisture responses cannot be extrapolated to predict SCE under altered rainfall.


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