Aim: Plant community assembly in tropical rainforest has been shown to be largely governed by stochastic processes, but as arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi display limited host preference, they may not follow the same stochastic assembly pattern. Here, we determined the relative importance of environmental and spatial drivers responsible for the community assembly process of AM fungi in two types of tropical rainforest (semideciduous rainforest and dense ombrophilous forests). Location: Atlantic rainforest in northeastern Brazil, South...

1. Information on direct and indirect drivers of temporal variation in ant-plant interactions is scarce, compromising our ability to predict the functioning of these ecologically important interactions. 2. We investigated the roles of precipitation, ant activity, abundance of young plant tissues bearing extrafloral nectaries (EFNs), and EFN phenotypes in the establishment of EFN-mediated ant-plant interactions throughout the year in Amazonia, Brazil. We hypothesized that the frequency of ant-plant interactions follows a predictable seasonal pattern, being...