The climbing habit is a key innovation in plants: climbing taxa have higher species richness than non-climbing sister groups. We evaluated the hypothesis that climbing plant species show greater among-population genetic differentiation than non-climber species. We compared the among-population genetic distance in woody climbers (8 species, 30 populations) and trees (7 species, 29 populations) coexisting in 9 communities in a temperate rainforest. We also compared within-population genetic diversity in co-occurring woody climbers and trees in...

Positive species-genetic diversity correlations (SGDCs) are often thought to result from the parallel influence of neutral processes on genetic and species diversity. Yet, confounding effects of non-neutral mechanisms have not been explored. Here, we investigate the impact of non-neutral genetic diversity on SGDCs in high Andean wetlands. We compare correlations between plant species diversity (SD) and genetic diversity (GD) calculated with and without loci potentially under selection (outlier loci). The study system includes 2188 specimens...

Plant litter breakdown is a key ecological process in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. Streams and rivers, in particular, have high rates of carbon dioxide evasion and they contribute substantially to global carbon fluxes. However, there is little information available on the relative roles of different drivers of plant litter breakdown in fresh waters, particularly at large scales. We present a global-scale study of litter breakdown in streams to compare the roles of biotic, climatic and...

Dispersal and adaptation are the two primary mechanisms that set the range distributions for a population or species. As such, understanding how these mechanisms interact in marine organisms in particular – with capacity for long-range dispersal and a poor understanding of what selective environments species are responding to – can provide useful insights for the exploration of biogeographic patterns. Previously, the barnacle Notochthamalus scabrosus has revealed two evolutionarily distinct lineages with a joint distribution that...

The growth limitation hypothesis (GLH) is the most accepted explanation for treeline formation, but it has been scarcely examined in Mediterranean treelines, which are located at lower elevations than temperate treelines. The GLH states that low temperature is the ultimate environmental driver for treeline formation, constraining C-sinks (i.e. tissue formation) more than C-sources. The GLH predicts similar or increasing (but not decreasing) non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) concentrations with elevation throughout the course of the growing season....