The flowering plant tree of life has enormous potential for biodiversity research. This is because, just as one can predict the properties of an element based on its position in the periodic table, the location of a species in the tree of life allows researchers to predict its properties. The...
The successful colonization of new habitats has played a fundamental role during the evolution of life. Salinity is one of the strongest barriers for organisms to cross, which has resulted in the evolution of distinct marine and non-marine (including bot
Understanding the environmental control of tree biomass demands consideration of the drivers of individual tree growth over their lifespan. This can be achieved by studies of tree growth in permanent sample plots (prospective studies) and tree ring analyses (retrospective studies). However, ...
“While the main goals of this large-scale project were to understand the relationships of all flowering plant genera, it also sheds light on the timing of major events in the evolution of complex flower forms and life histories,” Dr. Michelangeli said. “Large analyses such as this can pro...
The Tree of Life is in peril due to human population growth and activities. There have been five previous mass extinctions in the history of our planet all caused by natural events including meteor impact and volcanic eruptions. Welcome to the early stages of the sixth mass extinction on Earth...
Although expansion of PA coverage is prioritized under the Convention on Biological Diversity, it remains unknown whether PAs mitigate declines across the tetrapod tree of life and to what extent land cover and climate change modify PA effectiveness1,2. Here we analysed rates of change in abundance...
Our results indicate that the tree-ring δ13C series do contain age-related trends throughout the trees' lifespan. This age-dependence corresponded to an ascending linear change of ca. 0.4‰ per 100 years. Illustrating the mean δ13C curve as a function of trees' biological age demonstrated...
Instead, these species in our study were characterized by a life history strategy of extreme conservatism in an intermediate size class, leading to very low growth and mortality in that size class, and thus to a peak in the size distribution at intermediate sizes. 展开 ...
The consistent monitoring of trees both inside and outside of forests is key to sustainable land management. Current monitoring systems either ignore trees outside forests or are too expensive to be applied consistently across countries on a repeated bas
Traits and phenology parameters are assigned randomly during the establishment of a new tree and remain fixed during the whole lifetime of the individual (except tree height). Traits were drawn out of PFT-specific ranges according to global plant trait databases31. Due to environmental filtering ...