Download or read book Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics Between Plants and Their Soil Community written by James D. Bever and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ecological and Evolutionary Dynamics of Plant soil Feedbacks written by Michael E. Van Nuland and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plants interact with, modify, and are affected by their soil environments. Though plant-soil interactions are well known to be important and active regulators of ecosystem function and community structure, much less is known about how these interactions affect plant evolution. The primary goal of my dissertation was to examine plant-soil interactions under a range of ecological and evolutionary contexts to better understand patterns of biodiversity, ecosystem function, and whole system responses to environmental change. Taking such an eco-evolutionary perspective allows for a holistic understanding of the causes and consequences of complex abiotic and biotic interactions that link ecosystem ecology and evolution. In my first chapter, I reviewed what is known about genetic interactions between plants, soils, and soil communities, and in doing so, identified a new mechanism for how genetically based plant-soil feedbacks might emerge at large scales. In my second chapter, I used field observations and multiple experimental approaches to test whether soil N acts as a selective gradient on plant phenotypes, if soil microbial communities mediate the selective pressure, and whether plant genetic variation impacts soil N pools. In my third chapter, I developed climate and soil ecological niche models, combined with a new double quantile regression approach, to tests how traits are adapted or plastic at critical environmental limits. Finally, my fourth chapter examined how plant-soil interactions and feedbacks at landscape scales may influence range dynamics and associated ecosystem processes as species move upwards towards higher elevations with rising temperatures. Overall, my dissertation sought to bring an evolutionary perspective to ecosystem ecology research by investigating the genetic mechanisms and outcomes of plant-soil interactions.
Download or read book Eco evolutionary Dynamics written by Andrew P. Hendry and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, scientists have realized that evolution can occur on timescales much shorter than the 'long lapse of ages' emphasized by Darwin - in fact, evolutionary change is occurring all around us all the time. This work provides an authoritative and accessible introduction to eco-evolutionary dynamics, a cutting-edge new field that seeks to unify evolution and ecology into a common conceptual framework focusing on rapid and dynamic environmental and evolutionary change.
Download or read book Below Ground Interactions in Ecological Processes written by Oren Shelef and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aboveground interactions between plants and organisms have served as a foundation of ecological and evolutionary theories. Accumulating evidence suggests that interactions that occur belowground can have immense influence on eco-evolutionary dynamics of plants. Despite the increasing awareness among scientists of the importance of belowground interactions for plant performance and community dynamics, they have received considerably less theoretical and empirical attention compared to aboveground interactions. In this eBook we aim to highlight the overlooked roles of belowground interactions and outline their myriad ecological roles, from affecting soil health through impacting plant interactions with above-ground fauna. This eBook with 18 articles and an Editorial includes conceptual contribution together with original research work. The chapters are exploring the roles of belowground biotic interactions, in the context of ecological processes both below- and above-ground.
Download or read book Evolutionary Dynamics of Plant Pathogen Interactions written by Jeremy J. Burdon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broad view of plant-pathogen interactions illustrating the fundamental reciprocal role pathogens and hosts play in shaping each other's ecology and evolution.
Download or read book Competition and Coexistence written by Ulrich Sommer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question "Why are there so many species?" has puzzled ecologist for a long time. Initially, an academic question, it has gained practical interest by the recent awareness of global biodiversity loss. Species diversity in local ecosystems has always been discussed in relation to the problem of competi tive exclusion and the apparent contradiction between the competitive exclu sion principle and the overwhelming richness of species found in nature. Competition as a mechanism structuring ecological communities has never been uncontroversial. Not only its importance but even its existence have been debated. On the one extreme, some ecologists have taken competi tion for granted and have used it as an explanation by default if the distribu tion of a species was more restricted than could be explained by physiology and dispersal history. For decades, competition has been a core mechanism behind popular concepts like ecological niche, succession, limiting similarity, and character displacement, among others. For some, competition has almost become synonymous with the Darwinian "struggle for existence", although simple plausibility should tell us that organisms have to struggle against much more than competitors, e.g. predators, parasites, pathogens, and envi ronmental harshness.
Download or read book Positive Plant Interactions and Community Dynamics written by Francisco Pugnaire and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the concept of the "struggle for life" became the heart of Darwin's theory of evolution, biologists have studied the relevance of interactions for the natural history and evolution of organisms. Although positive interactions among plants have traditionally received little attention, there is now a growing body of evidence showing the ef
Download or read book Plant Strategies and the Dynamics and Structure of Plant Communities MPB 26 Volume 26 written by David Tilman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although ecologists have long considered morphology and life history to be important determinants of the distribution, abundance, and dynamics of plants in nature, this book contains the first theory to predict explicitly both the evolution of plant traits and the effects of these traits on plant community structure and dynamics. David Tilman focuses on the universal requirement of terrestrial plants for both below-ground and above-ground resources. The physical separation of these resources means that plants face an unavoidable tradeoff. To obtain a higher proportion of one resource, a plant must allocate more of its growth to the structures involved in its acquisition, and thus necessarily obtain a lower proportion of another resource. Professor Tilman presents a simple theory that includes this constraint and tradeoff, and uses the theory to explore the evolution of plant life histories and morphologies along productivity and disturbance gradients. The book shows that relative growth rate, which is predicted to be strongly influenced by a plant's proportional allocation to leaves, is a major determinant of the transient dynamics of competition. These dynamics may explain the differences between successions on poor versus rich soils and suggest that most field experiments performed to date have been of too short a duration to allow unambiguous interpretation of their results.
Download or read book Soil Ecology and Ecosystem Services written by Diana H. Wall and published by . This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-contributor, international volume synthesizes contributions from the world's leading soil scientists and ecologists, describing cutting-edge research that provides a basis for the maintenance of soil health and sustainability. The book covers these advances from a unique perspective of examining the ecosystem services produced by soil biota across different scales - from biotic interactions at microscales to communities functioning at regional and global scales. The book leads the user towards an understanding of how the sustainability of soils, biodiversity, and ecosystem services can be maintained and how humans, other animals, and ecosystems are dependent on living soils and ecosystem services. This is a valuable reference book for academic libraries and professional ecologists worldwide as a statement of progress in the broad field of soil ecology. It will also be of interest to both upper level undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in soil ecology, as well as academic researchers and professionals in the field requiring an authoritative, balanced, and up-to-date overview of this fast expanding topic.
Download or read book Geoecology An Evolutionary Approach written by Richard Huggett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals, plants and soils interact with one another, with the terrestrial spheres, and with the rest of the Cosmos. On land, this rich interaction creates landscape systems or geoecosystems. Geoecology investigates the structure and function of geoecosystems, their components and their environment. The author develops a simple dynamic systems model, the `brash' equation, to form the conceptual framework for the book suggesting an `ecological' and `evolutionary' approach. Exploring internal of `ecological' interactions between geoecosystems and their near-surface environments - the atmosphere, hydrosphere, toposhere, and lithosphere - and external influences, both geological and cosmic, Geoecology presents geoecosystems as dynamic entities constantly responding to changes within themselves and their surroundings. An `evolutionary' view emerges of geoecological systems, and the animals, plants, and soils comprising them, providing a new way of thinking for the whole environmental complex and the rich web of interdependencies contained therein.
Download or read book The Adaptive Landscape in Evolutionary Biology written by Erik Svensson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'Adaptive Landscape' has been a central concept in population genetics and evolutionary biology since this powerful metaphor was first formulated in 1932. This volume brings together historians of science, philosophers, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists, to discuss the state of the art from several different perspectives.
Download or read book Eco Evolutionary Dynamics written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme of this volume is to discuss Eco-evolutionary Dynamics. Updates and informs the reader on the latest research findings Written by leading experts in the field Highlights areas for future investigation
Download or read book Coexistence written by Jan Sapp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about tropical biology in action- how biologists grapple with the ecology and evolution of the great species diversity in tropical rainforests and coral reefs. Tropical rainforests are home to 50% of all the plant and animal species on earth, though they cover only about 2% of the planet. Coral reefs hold 25% of the world's marine diversity, though they represent only 0.1 % of the world's surface. The increase in species richness from the poles to the tropics has remained enigmatic to naturalists for more than 200 years. How have so many species evolved in the tropics? How can so many species coexist there? At a time when rainforests and coral reefs are shrinking, when the earth is facing what has been called the sixth mass extinction, understanding the evolutionary ecology of the tropics is everyone's business. Despite the fundamental importance of the tropics to all of life on earth, tropical biology has evolved relatively slowly and with difficulties - economic, political, and environmental. This book is also about tropical science in context, situated in the complex socio-political history, and the rich rainforests and coral reefs of Panama. There are no other books on the history of tropical ecology and evolution or on the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Thus situated in historical context, Jan Sapp's aim is to understand how naturalists have studied and conceptualized the great biological diversity and entangled ecology of tropics. This book has potential to be used in tropical biology classes, ecology courses, evolutionary ecology and it could also be useful in classes on the history of biology.
Download or read book The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography written by Stephen P. Hubbell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its supreme importance and the threat of its global crash, biodiversity remains poorly understood both empirically and theoretically. This ambitious book presents a new, general neutral theory to explain the origin, maintenance, and loss of biodiversity in a biogeographic context. Until now biogeography (the study of the geographic distribution of species) and biodiversity (the study of species richness and relative species abundance) have had largely disjunct intellectual histories. In this book, Stephen Hubbell develops a formal mathematical theory that unifies these two fields. When a speciation process is incorporated into Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson's now classical theory of island biogeography, the generalized theory predicts the existence of a universal, dimensionless biodiversity number. In the theory, this fundamental biodiversity number, together with the migration or dispersal rate, completely determines the steady-state distribution of species richness and relative species abundance on local to large geographic spatial scales and short-term to evolutionary time scales. Although neutral, Hubbell's theory is nevertheless able to generate many nonobvious, testable, and remarkably accurate quantitative predictions about biodiversity and biogeography. In many ways Hubbell's theory is the ecological analog to the neutral theory of genetic drift in genetics. The unified neutral theory of biogeography and biodiversity should stimulate research in new theoretical and empirical directions by ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and biogeographers.
Download or read book Extended Heredity written by Russell Bonduriansky and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bonduriansky and Day challenge the premise that genes alone mediate the transmission of biological information across generations and provide the raw material for natural selection. They explore the latest research showing that what happens during our lifetimes—and even our parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes—can influence the features of our descendants. Based on this evidence, Bonduriansky and Day develop an extended concept of heredity that upends ideas about how traits can and cannot be transmitted across generations, opening the door to a new understanding of inheritance, evolution, and even human health. --Adapted from publisher description.
Download or read book Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Genotypic Variation and Indirect Genetic Effects on Plant neighbor Interactions written by Mark Alan Genung and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most explanations for community structure exclude the effects of genes above the population level, but recent research suggests that distinct genotypes of dominant plant species can also play important roles in structuring associated communities and influencing ecosystem processes. However, very little is understood about how the outcomes of plant-neighbor interactions are determined by intraspecific genotypic variation and indirect genetic effects (IGEs), which are influences on the phenotype of a focal individual due to the expression of genes in an interacting individual. Using clones of both Solidago altissima and Solidago gigantea, I established two common garden experiments and a decomposition experiment to determine how genotypic variation and neighbor genotype (IGEs) affected a range of population, community, and ecosystem level responses. These included above- and belowground plant productivity and biomass allocation, plant chemistry, pollinator visitation, decomposition rate, and nutrient cycling. Combined, the results from the first common garden and decomposition experiment showed that IGEs changed belowground plant traits, and these changes also affected litter quality at the time of plant senescence. These shifts in litter quality extended to affect ecosystem processes, specifically decomposition rate and nitrogen (N) immobilization. This result shows that IGEs can initiate "afterlife effects", linking aboveground-belowground interactions with evolutionary processes. Because IGEs strongly affected belowground plant traits in my first common garden, I established a second common garden which manipulated the presence of belowground interactions between neighboring plants. The goal of this garden was to test the hypothesis that IGEs are most important for traits related to acquiring limiting resources, which for my species was the supply of belowground nutrients. I found that IGEs explained over 20 times as much variation in focal plant belowground biomass than did focal plant genotype, but only in pots which allowed belowground interactions. To explore the importance of IGEs to questions at the interface of ecology and evolution, I also conducted a primary literature review which indicated that IGEs link ecological and evolutionary dynamics and that the consequences of this ecological-evolutionary linkage begin with the phenotype of an individual within a population and extend to the associated community and ecosystem.
Download or read book The Evolutionary Ecology of Plant Disease written by Gregory Gilbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the symbiosis between plants and pathogenic microbes is at the core of effective disease management for crops and managed forests. At the same time, plant-pathogen interactions comprise a wonderfully diverse set of ecological relationships that are powerful and yet so commonplace that they often go unnoticed. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists are increasingly exploring the terrain of plant disease ecology, investigating topics such as how pathogens shape diversity in plant communities, how features of plant-microbe interactions including host range and mutualism/antagonism evolve, and how biological invasions, climate change, and other agents of global change can drive disease emergence. Traditional training in ecology and evolutionary biology seldom provides structured exposure to plant pathology or microbiology, and training in plant pathology rarely offers depth in the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary ecology or includes examples from complex wild ecosystems. This novel textbook seeks to unite the research communities of plant disease ecology and plant pathology by bridging this gap.
