Biogeochemical cycles drive global biodiversity and plant productivity. In terrestrial ecosystems, nutrient losses through plants' litter are a critical component of these biogeochemical cycles. In forests, nutrient losses are thought to be higher in deciduous angiosperm species than in evergreen conifers. However, this premise of nutrient loss differentiation between contrasting leaf habits has not been evaluated in co‐occurr...

Soil bacteria play a crucial role in soil processes, such as carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling. While soil bacterial communities and their interactions with pedo‐climatic factors have been well documented, most studies typically focus on broad taxonomic levels, leaving distribution and responses at the genus level unexplored. This study optimized machine learning models to predict the distribution of dominant bacterial...

Aim Plant functional traits can influence interaction outcomes between nurse and target plants through a “functional trait match”, which occurs when the traits of nurse plants ameliorate their environment, and target plants possess traits that allow them to benefit from this ameliorated environment. We investigated how the traits of putative nurse species affect interaction outcomes across global drylands and determined the fu...

It is often speculated that non-native invasive species undergo rapid changes in their phenotypic properties (i.e., traits) that provide adaptive advantage in their new environment. However, few studies have directly compared traits of invasive non-native species with their native counterparts to reveal whether such phenotypic changes occur, and which stages of initial introduction and subsequent invasion contribute to these s...

Declines in soil multifunctionality (e.gsoil capacity to provide food and energy) are closely related to changes in the soil microbiome (e.g., diversity) Determining ecological drivers promoting such microbiome changes is critical knowledge for protecting soil functions. However, soil‐microbe interactions are highly variable within environmental gradients and may not be consistent across studies. Here we propose that analysis...

Purpose of Review The capacity of woody plants to cope with climate change depends on their adjustments to changing environmental conditions by phenotypic plasticity or by genotypic changes (i.e., local adaptation). To determine whether intraspecific trait variation (ITV) translates into resistance or tolerance to drought and eventually how it relates to performance when facing drought, we reviewed the recent literature on the...

Climate warming is expected to positively alter upward and poleward treelines which are controlled by low temperature and a short growing season. Despite the importance of treelines as a bioassay of climate change, a global field assessment and posterior forecasting of tree growth at annual scales is lacking. Using annually resolved tree‐ring data located across Eurasia and the Americas, we quantified and modeled the relations...

Aims Rising temperature and declining summer precipitation due to the 1970s‐climate shift in southern South America have reduced forest productivity at dry sites. Here, we worked with the most widespread Southern Hemisphere tree line species, Nothofagus pumilio , across contrasting climatic conditions and determined whether rising atmospheric CO 2 concentrations as well as warmer and drier climatic conditions provoked by the 7...

Understanding patterns of functional trait variation across environmental gradients offers an opportunity to increase inference in the mechanistic causes of plant community assembly. The leaf economics spectrum ( LES ) predicts global tradeoffs in leaf traits and trait‐environment relationships, but few studies have examined whether these predictions hold across different levels of organization, particularly within species. He...

Recent studies have shown that accounting for intraspecific trait variation ( ITV ) may better address major questions in community ecology. However, a general picture of the relative extent of ITV compared to interspecific trait variation in plant communities is still missing. Here, we conducted a meta‐analysis of the relative extent of ITV within and among plant communities worldwide, using a data set encompassing 629 commun...

Recent functional trait studies have shown that trait differences may favour certain species (environmental filtering) while simultaneously preventing competitive exclusion (niche partitioning). However, phenomenological trait‐dispersion analyses do not identify the mechanisms that generate niche partitioning, preventing trait‐based prediction of future changes in biodiversity. We argue that such predictions require linking fu...

The ecological processes that create spatial patterns have been examined by direct measurement and through measurement of patterns resulting from experimental manipulations. But in many situations, creating experiments and direct measurement of spatial processes can be difficult or impossible. Here, we identify and define a rapidly emerging alternative approach, which we formalize as “space as a surrogate” for unmeasured proce...

Aim The general model for Nothofagus regeneration dynamics states that the species of this genus tend to occur in frequent, coarse‐scale disturbance sites and/or in harsh conditions. The aim of this study is to test this regeneration model in deciduous mediterranean Nothofagus glauca forests at the northern limit of range of this genus, which include some of the most diverse but least well understood forests in the region. The...