Plants face a fundamental trade‐off between acquiring resources for growth or interspecific competition and simultaneously investing in anti‐consumer defenses. These selective pressures shape species' life history strategies and promote stable coexistence. However, the specific roles of distinct consumer groups, particularly the often‐overlooked oomycetes, in driving growth–defense trade‐offs and sustaining plant diversity rem...

The rapid biodiversity losses of the Anthropocene have motivated ecologists to understand how biodiversity affects infectious diseases. Spatial scale is thought to moderate negative biodiversity–disease relationships (i.e., dilution effects) in zoonotic diseases, whereas evidence from plant communities for an effect of scale remains limited, especially at local scales where the mechanisms (e.g., encounter reduction) underlying...