PLEASE NOTE, THESE DATA ARE ALSO REFERRED TO IN TWO OTHER PUBLICATIONS. PLEASE SEE DOI: 10.1111/ddi.12548 AND https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12357 --- The popularity of species distribution models (SDMs) and the associated stacked species distribution models (S‐SDMs), as tools for community ecologists, largely increased in recent years. However, while some consensus was reached about the best methods to threshold and evaluate individual SDMs, little agreement exists on how to best assemble individual SDMs into communities, that is, how...

Interactions between plants and root-associated fungi can affect the assembly, diversity, and relative abundances of tropical plant species. Host-symbiont compatibility and some degree of host specificity are prerequisites for these processes to occur, and these prerequisites may vary with host abundance. However, direct assessments of whether specificity of root-associated fungi varies with host abundance are lacking. Here, in a diverse tropical forest in Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, we couple DNA metabarcoding with a sampling design that...

1. Invasive tree pests are increasingly threatening forest ecosystems. Understanding and controlling their spread presents a major challenge for managers, researchers, and policy makers. In 1999, the pine wood nematode Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, causal agent of pine wilt disease and native to North America, was first detected in Europe, more precisely in south western Portugal. Since then, it has spread to more than 30% of the country, producing large-scale damages in Portuguese forests. 2. We applied...

Aim: Understanding the relative roles of geography and ecology in driving speciation, population divergence and maintenance of species cohesion is of great interest to molecular ecology. Closely related species that are parapatrically distributed in mountainous areas provide an ideal model to evaluate these key issues, especially when genomic data are analyzed within a spatially and ecologically explicit context. Here we used three closely related species of Primula that occur in the Himalayas, the Hengduan Mountains...

Microsites where seeds arrive during the dispersal process determine plant reproductive success, affecting the quality of dispersal. Despite their crucial role for plant recruitment, very few studies have addressed spatio-temporal variations in microsites of seed arrival in complex seed-disperser networks. Using an endozoochorous dispersal system, we characterized the microsites of seed arrival of eight fleshy-fruited plant species dispersed by five mammal species during two consecutive seasons across three sites in a Mediterranean environment (n =...

Among their responses to microbial infection, plants deploy an arsenal of antibiotic natural products. While these historically have been identified on the basis of their antibiotic activity in vitro, this leaves open the question of their relevance to defense in planta. The vast majority of such natural products from the important crop plant rice (Oryza sativa) are diterpenoids whose biosynthesis proceeds via either ent- or syncopalyl diphosphate (CPP) intermediates, and which were isolated on the...