Disease-causing plant pathogens are an emerging global threat to forests, compromising carbon sequestration and shifting forests from carbon sinks to sources. Phytophthora agathidicida , the causal agent of a host-specific lethal root rot disease, kauri dieback, infects Agathis australis (New Zealand kauri). The disease causes progressive canopy decline and mortality of kauri, threatening forests where kauri dominate. We hypot...

Compositional uniqueness has become increasingly relevant for understanding how local communities contribute to regional biodiversity. The most widely used metric is the Local Contribution to Beta Diversity (), which is typically regressed against environmental predictors. However, can vary either because of environmental processes that affect the overall variance in community composition, or because communities change directi...

Identifying refugia from emerging threats is vital to ensure the persistence of rare and threatened species, but modeling habitat distribution for these species is challenging and the role of people in refuge management is rarely considered. Myrtle rust is an emerging infectious disease that represents a grave threat to the rare wetland tree species maire tawake ( Syzygium maire ) in Aotearoa New Zealand. We combined high‐reso...

There is currently a dichotomy in the modelling of Grinnellian and Eltonian niches. Despite similar underlying data, Grinnellian niches are modelled with species‐distribution models (SDMs), whereas Eltonian niches are modelled with ecological‐network analysis, mainly because the sparsity of species‐interaction data prevents the application of SDMs to Eltonian‐niche modelling. Here, we propose to adapt recently developed joint...

Understanding the role of climate in the assembly of rainforest tree communities is informative for predicting how future climates will impact species and communities. We surveyed rainforest tree communities across the Australian subtropics (spanning 600 to 2500 mm rainfall year −1 ) and measured functional traits on 285 (91%) of all recorded species. We used principal component analysis to create axes approximating species' h...

Growth in individual size or biomass is a key demographic component in population models, with wide‐ranging applications from quantifying species performance across abiotic or biotic conditions to assessing landscape‐level dynamics under global change. In forest ecology, the responses of tree growth to biotic interactions are widely held to be crucial for understanding forest diversity, function, and structure. To date, most s...

Identifying generalisable processes that underpin population dynamics is crucial for understanding successional patterns. While longitudinal or chronosequence data are powerful tools for doing so, the traditional focus on community‐level shifts in taxonomic and functional composition rather than species‐level trait–demography relationships has made generalisation difficult. Using joint species distribution models, we demonstra...

Secondary forests are important carbon sinks, but their biomass dynamics vary markedly within and across landscapes. The biotic and abiotic drivers of this variation are still not well understood. We tested the effects of soil resource availability and competition by lianas on the biomass dynamics of young secondary tropical forests in Panama and assessed the extent to which liana effects were mediated by soil resource availab...

Alien plant species are known to have a wide range of impacts on recipient communities, from resident species’ exclusions to coexistence with resident species. It remains unclear; however, if this variety of impacts is due to different invader strategies, features of recipient communities or both. To test this, we examined multiple plant invasions of a single ecosystem in southwestern Australia. We used extensive community dat...