WILLIAM K. CORNWELL results 23
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Estimating the Impacts of Future Extreme Heat on Dryland Threatened Mammals: An Australian Case StudyNARA Subscribed
Extreme heat is an escalating threat to biodiversity, with dryland ecosystems particularly vulnerable. Using Australia's dryland mammals as a model system, we present a framework comparing baseline and future heat envelopes for 36 threatened species to quantify future heat exposure, identify potential refugia and evaluate the suitability of translocation sites. We conducted a systematic review to assess our understanding of th...
Aim Termites are a crucial group of macroinvertebrates regulating rates of deadwood decomposition across tropical and subtropical regions. When examining global patterns of deadwood decay, termites are treated as a homogenous group. There exist key biogeographical differences in termite distribution. One such clear distinction is the distribution of fungus‐growing termites (FGT, subfamily Macrotermitinae). Considering that cli...
Despite host‐fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life‐history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free‐living to symbiotic fungi of plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orde...
Irruption of herbivore populations due to the extirpation of predators has led to dramatic changes in ecosystem functioning worldwide. Herbivores compete with other species for their primary source of nutrition, plant biomass. Such competition is typically considered to occur between species in closely related clades and functional groups but could also occur with detritivores that consume senescent plant biomass. In this stud...
Aim As urban areas continue to expand, it is increasingly important to quantify species‐specific responses to urban environments, and how these change across the full annual cycle. Our objective was to quantify urban tolerance for North American birds across the time. We tested (a) whether intra‐annual variability of urban tolerance differed between migrants and residents and (b) whether intra‐annual variability of urban toler...
TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open accessNARA Subscribed
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodivers...
Good neighbors aplenty: fungal endophytes rarely exhibit competitive exclusion patterns across a span of woody habitatsNARA Subscribed
Environmental forces and biotic interactions, both positive and negative, structure ecological communities, but their relative roles remain obscure despite strong theory. For instance, ecologically similar species, based on the principle of limiting similarity, are expected to be most competitive and show negative interactions. Specious communities that assemble along broad environmental gradients afford the most power to test...
For the majority of plant species in the world, we know little about their functional ecology, and not even one of the most basic traits—the species’ growth habit. To fill the gap in availability of compiled plant growth‐form data, we have assembled what is, to our knowledge, the largest global database on growth‐form as a plant trait. We have, with extensive error checking and data synthesis, assembled a growth‐form database...
Climate and soils together regulate photosynthetic carbon isotope discrimination within C 3 plants worldwideNARA Subscribed
Aim Within C 3 plants, photosynthesis is a balance between CO 2 supply from the atmosphere via stomata and demand by enzymes within chloroplasts. This process is dynamic and a complex but crucial aspect of photosynthesis. We sought to understand the spatial pattern in CO 2 supply–demand balance on a global scale, via analysis of stable isotopes of carbon within leaves (Δ 13 C), which provide an integrative record of CO 2 drawd...
Aim The earth's land cover is often represented by discrete classes, and predicting shifts between these classes is a major goal in the field. One increasingly common approach is to build models that predict land cover classes with probabilities rather than discrete outcomes. Current assessment approaches have drawbacks when applied to these types of models. In this paper we present a new metric, which assesses agreement betwe...
Global patterns of plant root colonization intensity by mycorrhizal fungi explained by climate and soil chemistryNARA Subscribed
Aim Most vascular plants on E arth form mycorrhizae, a symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi. Despite the broad recognition of the importance of mycorrhizae for global carbon and nutrient cycling, we do not know how soil and climate variables relate to the intensity of colonization of plant roots by mycorrhizal fungi. Here we quantify the global patterns of these relationships. Location Global. Methods Data on plant...
Global relationship of wood and leaf litter decomposability: the role of functional traits within and across plant organsNARA Subscribed
Aim Recent meta‐analyses have revealed that plant traits and their phylogenetic history influence decay rates of dead wood and leaf litter, but it remains unknown if decay rates of wood and litter covary over a wide range of tree species and across ecosystems. We evaluated the relationships between species‐specific wood and leaf litter decomposability, as well as between wood and leaf traits that control their respective decom...
The leaf economics spectrum (LES) has revolutionized the way many ecologists think about quantifying plant ecological trade‐offs. In particular, the LES has connected a clear functional trade‐off (long‐lived leaves with slow carbon capture vs. short‐lived leaves with fast carbon capture) to a handful of easily measured leaf traits. Building on this work, community ecologists are now able to quickly assess species carbon‐captur...
Wood represents the defining feature of forest systems, and often the carbon in woody debris has a long residence time. Globally, coarse dead wood contains 36–72 Pg C, and understanding what controls the fate of this C is important for predicting C cycle responses to global change. The fate of a piece of wood may include one or more of the following: microbial decomposition, combustion, consumption by insects, and physical deg...
Global meta‐analysis of wood decomposition rates: a role for trait variation among tree species?NARA Subscribed
The carbon flux from woody debris, a crucial uncertainty within global carbon‐climate models, is simultaneously affected by climate, site environment and species‐based variation in wood quality. In the first global analysis attempting to explicitly tease out the wood quality contribution to decomposition, we found support for our hypothesis that, under a common climate, interspecific differences in wood traits affect woody deb...
Plant species traits are the predominant control on litter decomposition rates within biomes worldwideNARA Subscribed
Worldwide decomposition rates depend both on climate and the legacy of plant functional traits as litter quality. To quantify the degree to which functional differentiation among species affects their litter decomposition rates, we brought together leaf trait and litter mass loss data for 818 species from 66 decomposition experiments on six continents. We show that: (i) the magnitude of species‐driven differences is much large...
A Trait-based Test for Habitat Filtering: Convex Hull VolumeNARA Subscribed
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