Understanding the controls on the amount and persistence of soil organic carbon (C) is essential for predicting its sensitivity to global change. The response may depend on whether C is unprotected, isolated within aggregates, or protected from decomposition by mineral associations. Here, we present a global synthesis of the relative influence of environmental factors on soil organic C partitioning among pools, abundance in ea...

Dispersal is a key ecological process that is strongly influenced by both phenotype and environment. Here, we show that juvenile environment influences dispersal not only by shaping individual phenotypes, but also by changing the phenotypes of neighbouring conspecifics, which influence how individuals disperse. We used a model system ( Tribolium castaneum , red flour beetles) to test how the past environment of dispersing indi...

Stomata control gas exchanges between the plant and the atmosphere. How natural variation in stomata size and density contributes to resolve trade‐offs between carbon uptake and water loss in response to local climatic variation is not yet understood. We developed an automated confocal microscopy approach to characterize natural genetic variation in stomatal patterning in 330 fully sequenced Arabidopsis thaliana accessions col...

The evolutionary processes and genetics underlying local adaptation at a specieswide level are largely unknown. Recent work has indicated that a frameshift mutation in a member of a family of transcription factors, C‐repeat binding factors or CBF s, underlies local adaptation and freezing tolerance divergence between two European populations of Arabidopsis thaliana . To ask whether the specieswide evolution of CBF genes in Ara...