Plant-soil feedbacks (PSF) play an important role in determining plant community structure and dynamics. However, previous studies have provided mixed results for the relationship between PSF and plant landscape abundance (i.e., abundance across local communities). This may reflect the mediation of climate factors on PSF. Here, we tested how PSF of tree species varied with local abundances by growing seedlings in conspecific versus heterospecific soil and how simulated drought altered PSF-plant abundance relationships. Six tree...

Systematic comparisons of species interactions in urban vs. rural environments can improve our understanding of shifts in ecological processes due to urbanization. However, such studies are relatively uncommon and the mechanisms driving urbanization effects on species interactions (e.g., between plants and insect herbivores) remain elusive. Here we investigated the effects of urbanization on leaf herbivory by insect chewers and miners associated with the English oak (Quercus robur) by sampling trees in rural and urban areas...

Aim: To advance our understanding of how foliar fungal communities are structured and assembled, we assessed to what extent leaf flush and latitude can explain the within- and among-tree variation in the foliar fungal community in a foundation tree species, the pedunculate oak Quercus robur. Location: A latitudinal gradient spanning c. 20 degrees in latitude in Europe. Major taxa studied: The foliar fungal community on Quercus robur. Methods: We examined the main and interactive effects...

A long-standing paradigm in ecology holds that herbivore pressure and thus plant defences increase towards lower latitudes. However, recent work has challenged this prediction where studies have found no relationship or opposite trends where herbivory or plant defences increase at higher latitudes. Here we tested for latitudinal variation in herbivory, chemical defences (phenolic compounds), and nutritional traits (phosphorus and nitrogen) in leaves of a long-lived tree species, the English oak Quercus robur. We further investigated...

The world is rapidly urbanizing, thereby transforming natural landscapes and changing the abundance and distribution of organisms. However, insights into the effects of urbanization on species interactions, and plant-pathogen interactions in particular, are lacking. We investigated the effects of urbanization on powdery mildew infection on Quercus robur at continental and within-city scales. At the continental scale, we compared infection levels between urban and rural areas of different-sized cities in Europe, and investigated whether plant traits,...