Dimensioning the impacts of rainforest transformations below-ground is constrained by our understanding of fungal functional guilds. Highly modified systems exhibited fewer connections, suggesting a dynamic restructuring of root–fungal relationships in response to land-use changes. Understanding the intricate interplay between plants and fungi in the face of land-use change can provide valuable information for conservation efforts, agricultural practices and ecosystem management strategies aimed at promoting biodiversity, soil health and ecosystem resilience in the context of changing environmental conditions. Moreover, it underscores the importance of communities' networks in land-use planning and management decisions to support plant and fungal diversity in terrestrial ecosystems.

How conifers and angiosperms coexist is an enduring question. Using seedling repeat count data, we have developed a novel method to answer it in terms of their regeneration niches. We examined range-wide survival rates and filtering from forest plots throughout temperate evergreen forests spanning multiple major environmental gradients. Surprisingly, conifer and angiosperm regeneration niches were remarkably similar. (Picture Credit: Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research).

Seed and seedling stages are each characterized by multiple dimensions of functioning that reflect variation in morphology, development and environmental response. Across dozens of dryland species, we found ontogenetic coordination between some aspects of functioning, such as seed and seedling morphology, yet traits associated with environmental response were often independent across stages or from other functions. This suggests that co-occurring species may vary across many independent dimensions of functioning during plant recruitment.

Our results provide the first evaluation of leaf biomechanical traits from three standard physical resistance tests as predictors of leaf-litter decomposability. These biomechanical traits complement chemical, structural and morphological traits and should be more effectively integrated into existing models to enhance our comprehension of the leaf-litter decomposition process.

We demonstrate that key functional traits undergo shifts in their relationship with growth as plants mature. Therefore, it will be valuable to shift our understanding of plant strategies away from the notion that traits influence growth rates in a fixed manner across plant sizes and ages.

Foliar δ¹⁵N patterns depicted a clear correlation with mycorrhizal association types, underscoring the critical role of mycorrhizal data in interpreting global foliar δ¹⁵N distributions. These findings enhance our understanding of nitrogen cycling dynamics across different plant types and global ecosystems.

The data support the hypothesis that the probability of mutualistic plant species establishing in a community is more strongly constrained by the phylogenetic conservation of compatible locally available mutualistic partners than is true for related species that do not form mutualistic symbiosis. In addition, this constraint occurs both in the native and introduced plant ranges. The findings highlight the significant role mutualism (in the form of bacterial symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing rhizobia) can play in constraining phylogenetic diversity in legume communities across the globe. This study advances community assembly theory and underscores the importance of considering mutualism in the conservation and restoration of phylogenetic diversity.

Pioneer species Hippophae acquires phosphorus and nitrogen mainly by ‘mining’ and N₂-fixing strategies and thus dominates in the beginning of primary succession. As soil nutrient availability increases with the mobilization of apatite-P and input of N-rich plant residues, Hippophae' strategies become less efficient than Populus's scavenging strategies. Consequently, Hippophae is gradually replaced by Populus after 50 years of succession.

We describe the diversity of ways in which fire operates as a fundamental ecological and evolutionary process on Earth. We explore research priorities in six categories of fire ecology. We identify three needs: to study fire across temporal scales, to assess the mechanisms underlying a variety of ecological feedbacks involving fire and to improve representation of fire in modeling contexts.