This study's findings suggest that light pollution and nutrient enrichment may jointly confer growth advantage to invasive alien plant species over that of co-occurring native plant species and enhance invasiveness of alien plant species.

This study found that co-adapted crop species with reduced negative interactions might have the potential to enhance productivity, especially in more diverse cropping systems. This supports the notion that intercropping is a vital part towards a more sustainable agriculture and one with further yield potential when developing cultivars optimised for growth in mixtures.

The authors studied how changes in overall winter climate affect frost damage in three common bryophyte taxa, using a snow manipulation experiment at two different elevations. Findings show frost damage to be higher in the milder climate, while snow cover effects differed across taxa. These results imply that climate warming in late winter and spring may have damaging effects on subarctic bryophytes. Photo: snow addition plot at the high site (by Marlene Kassel).

The authors reconstructed patterns of cycling in spruce budworm and forest tent caterpillar outbreaks over 100+ years in a mixed-species forest. While they observed overall synchrony in cycling consistent with harmonic oscillation theory, they found a persistent negative spatial correlation among successive eruptive pulses of defoliation. Many of these eruptions failed to spread spatially to form extensive outbreaks. Eruptions often failed to spread at the hardwood-conifer interface, resulting in outbreak pulses that systematically bounce back and forth between landscape types, particularly when systems were cycling at low amplitude. These over-dispersed spatial patterns of pulse impact are consistent with a contagious theory of eruption and outbreak spread, suggesting a hybrid cyclic-eruptive clockwork-catastrophe modelling approach better characterises outbreak behaviour.

Mechanisms underlying plant invasions are highly complex and a number of factors can jointly influence the outcomes of this process. However, since different invasion drivers operate at different spatial scales, some important associations may be overlooked when focusing on a single spatial context. Although associations were consistent in direction (positive or negative) across scales, their relative influence on goldenrod occurrence often changed. Socio-economic factors were largely important at local scales, while the effect of landscape factors broadly increased with increasing spatial scale. We highlight that using multi-scale approaches involving a wide range of variables may enable setting priorities for the management of invasive alien plants.

The study of mycobiont specialisation towards their photobionts in epiphytic lichen communities in a fragmented Mediterranean forest revealed a complex interaction between species life history traits and habitat fragmentation. In particular, this interplay had a significant impact on the specialisation of mycobionts. The results show the ability of some species to modulate their specialisation according to habitat conditions, suggesting that some species may be more resilient to abiotic changes than expected.

We combine observational and experimental approaches to disentangle recruitment limitation factors during primary succession on Reunion. We show on a typical historical lava flow that small-seeded native plants that are still dispersed cannot establish due to strong post-dispersal limitations and that native large-seeded plants cannot establish due to frugivore loss. Direct sowing of native plants with higher competitive ability offers promising prospects for future ecological restoration programmes.

Overall, our results suggest that rainfall reductions predicted by climate change models for the Mediterranean region might have minor direct negative effects on early regeneration of tree species, but could play a major indirect role by limiting the negative effects of exotic pathogens on highly susceptible tree species. These findings highlight that antagonisms among global change drivers should be recognized as important forces that might slow down the current loss of tree health.

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.

Our study indicates that successful management of exotic invasions is likely to require not only control of the invader but also restoration of diverse and productive herbaceous communities as they are important for many ecosystem functions. This highlights the importance of biodiversity as a driver of ecosystem functioning also in real-world systems.