1. Restoration of degraded plant communities requires understanding of community assembly processes. Human land use can influence plant community assembly by altering environmental conditions and species’ dispersal patterns. Flooding, including from environmental flows, may counteract land use effects on wetland vegetation. We examined the influence of land use history and flood frequency on the functional composition of wetland plant communities along a regulated river. 2. We applied fourth corner modelling to determine species’ trait-based responses...

When brood parasites exploit multiple host species, egg rejection by hosts may select for the evolution of host-specific races, where each race mimics a particular host’s egg type. However, some brood parasites that exploit multiple hosts with the ability to reject foreign eggs appear to have only a single egg type. In these cases, it is unclear how the parasite egg escapes detection by its hosts. Three possible explanations are: (i) host-specific races are present,...

Ontogenetic allometry, how species change with size through their lives, and heterochony, a decoupling between shape, size and age, are major contributors to biological diversity. However, macro-evolutionary allometric and heterochronic trends remain poorly understood because previous studies have focused on small groups of closely related species. Here we focus on testing hypotheses about the evolution of allometry and how allometry and heterochrony drive morphological diversification at the level of an entire species-rich and diverse clade....