Climate change is rapidly altering high-latitude coastal wetlands through increasing temperatures, more frequent flooding, and changing herbivore abundance and distribution. Examining plant functional trait responses to these drivers provides insight into how plant communities are shaped by climate change. We used a one-year full-factorial mesocosm experiment in coastal Alaska to assess immediate responses of two size-related...

Aims Herbivores create large differences in litter decomposition rates, but identifying how they do this can be difficult because they simultaneously influence both biotic and abiotic factors. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) River Delta in western Alaska, geese are dominant herbivores in wet-sedge meadows, where they create ‘grazing lawns’ that have nutrient-rich litter and an open habitat structure. To understand how geese affec...

Environmental changes, such as climate warming and higher herbivory pressure, are altering the carbon balance of Arctic ecosystems; yet, how these drivers modify the carbon balance among different habitats remains uncertain. This hampers our ability to predict changes in the carbon sink strength of tundra ecosystems. We investigated how spring goose grubbing and summer warming—two key environmental‐change drivers in the Arctic...

For over a century, deep roots have been assumed to allow trees to avoid competition with grasses (i.e., the two‐layer hypothesis). Yet, in part because it remains difficult to measure water uptake in the field, there has been a shift in savanna ecology away from the two‐layer hypothesis and towards alternative explanations of tree‐grass coexistence. Here, we combine hydrologic tracer experiments and soil water flow models to...

As the atmosphere warms, precipitation events become larger, but less frequent. Yet, there is fundamental disagreement about how increased precipitation intensity will affect vegetation. Walter's two‐layer hypothesis and experiments testing it have demonstrated that precipitation intensity can increase woody plant growth. Observational studies have found the opposite pattern. Not only are the patterns contradictory, but infere...

Aim Species distributions are one of the most important ways to understand how communities interact through macroecological relationships. The functional abilities of a species, such as its plasticity in various environments, can determine its distribution, species richness and beta diversity patterns. In this study, we evaluate how functional traits influence the distribution of amphibians, and hypothesize which functional tr...

The advancement of spring and the differential ability of organisms to respond to changes in plant phenology may lead to “phenological mismatches” as a result of climate change. One potential for considerable mismatch is between migratory birds and food availability in northern breeding ranges, and these mismatches may have consequences for ecosystem function. We conducted a three‐year experiment to examine the consequences fo...

Theory predicts that intraspecific competition should be stronger than interspecific competition for any pair of stably coexisting species, yet previous literature reviews found little support for this pattern. We screened over 5400 publications and identified 39 studies that quantified phenomenological intraspecific and interspecific interactions in terrestrial plant communities. Of the 67% of species pairs in which both intr...

Plant soil feedbacks ( PSF s) are thought to be important to plant growth and species coexistence, but most support for these hypotheses is derived from short‐term greenhouse experiments. Here we use a seven‐year, common garden experiment to measure PSF s for seven native and six nonnative species common to the western United States . We use these long‐term, field‐based estimates to test correlations between PSF and plant land...