Publications by authors named "Andreas Prinzing"

Background And Aims: There is ongoing debate about whether offspring perform best next to phylogenetically distantly related adult neighbours (due to the scarcity of enemies and competitors) or next to closely related adults (due to the abundance of mutualists). Here we hypothesise that relatedness of adult neighbours affects which traits confer performance rather than performance itself.

Methods: We studied seed removal, seed germination and sapling growth in Sessile Oaks (Quercus petraea and hybrids), and how they depend on size, shape and other traits, under both closely and distantly related canopies, manipulating offspring-density, presence of insects, and fungi, and spatial proximity to oaks.

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  • The defensive strategies of plants against herbivorous insects depend on environmental costs and benefits, influencing whether defenses are constitutive (always present) or inducible (produced in response to attack).
  • An experiment involving oak saplings in different tree-dominated neighborhoods revealed that oaks emit volatile compounds within 24 hours of herbivore treatment, while their leaf phenolics and carbon to nitrogen ratios showed little change over 16 days.
  • The study suggests oaks primarily use phenolic compounds as a constant defense mechanism and volatiles to attract natural predators when under attack, with potential influence from neighboring tree species possibly affecting leaf chemistry through shading effects.
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Premise: Plant lineages differ markedly in species richness globally, regionally, and locally. Differences in whole-genome characteristics (WGCs) such as monoploid chromosome number, genome size, and ploidy level may explain differences in global species richness through speciation or global extinction. However, it is unknown whether WGCs drive species richness within lineages also in a recent, postglacial regional flora or in local plant communities through local extinction or colonization and regional species turnover.

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Resource use by consumers across patches is often proportional to the quantity or quality of the resource within these patches. In folivores, such proportional use of resources is likely to be more efficient when plants are spatially proximate, such as trees forming a forest canopy. However, resources provided by forest-trees are often not used proportionally.

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  • The study explores how various factors, including tree genetics and neighbor species, affect caterpillar communities on oak trees, finding that recent leaf development and tree growth influences herbivore diversity and parasitism rates.
  • It highlights that the genetic makeup of oak trees plays a role in hosting certain herbivores, particularly leaf-mining casebearers, while the evolutionary relationships among trees can impact overall herbivore abundance.
  • Ultimately, the research suggests that the composition of insect communities on trees is primarily shaped by interactions involving tree traits and parasitism rather than the movement of insects among different tree species.
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  • * Research involving citizen scientists revealed that increased impervious surfaces (like concrete) around pedunculate oaks led to a decrease in insect damage, while more forest cover increased herbivory from chewing insects.
  • * Local canopy cover can mitigate the negative effects of impervious surfaces on certain herbivores, indicating that urban habitat characteristics play a crucial role in shaping plant-insect interactions.
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  • The study investigates the connection between functional diversity (variety in traits) and phylogenetic diversity (evolutionary relationships) in different animal groups, mainly focusing on ants, spiders, and ground beetles.
  • Researchers hypothesize that factors like the number of phylogenetic lineages and species, along with environmental pressures, influence the relationship between these diversities, with findings gathered from over 11,000 individuals in coastal heathlands.
  • Results show a strong link between functional and phylogenetic diversities overall, but this relationship varies among taxa; in ants, traits appear less tied to phylogeny, possibly due to competitive pressures, while spiders and beetles show more trait
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The functioning of present ecosystems reflects deep evolutionary history of locally cooccurring species if their functional traits show high phylogenetic signal (PS). However, we do not understand what drives local PS. We hypothesize that local PS is high in undisturbed and stressful habitats, either due to ongoing local assembly of species that maintained ancestral traits, or to past evolutionary maintenance of ancestral traits within habitat species-pools, or to both.

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Most parasites and parasitoids are adapted to overcome defense mechanisms of their specific hosts and hence colonize a narrow range of host species. Accordingly, an increase in host functional or phylogenetic dissimilarity is expected to increase the species diversity of parasitoids. However, the local diversity of parasitoids may be driven by the accessibility and detectability of hosts, both increasing with increasing host abundance.

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Background And Aims: Mammals and molluscs (MaM) are abundant herbivores of tree seeds and seedlings, but how the trees and their environment affect MaM herbivory has been little studied. MaM tend to move much larger distances during the feeding stage than the more frequently studied insect herbivores. We hypothesize that MaM (1) select and stay within the patches that promise to be relatively the richest in seeds and seedlings, i.

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Present biodiversity comprises the evolutionary heritage of Earth's epochs. Lineages from particular epochs are often found in particular habitats, but whether current habitat decline threatens the heritage from particular epochs is unknown. We hypothesized that within a given region, humans threaten specifically habitats that harbor lineages from a particular geological epoch.

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  • Plant traits, which include various characteristics like morphology and physiology, play a crucial role in how plants interact with their environment and impact ecosystems, making them essential for research in areas like ecology, biodiversity, and environmental management.
  • The TRY database, established in 2007, has become a vital resource for global plant trait data, promoting open access and enabling researchers to identify and fill data gaps for better ecological modeling.
  • Although the TRY database provides extensive data, there are significant areas lacking consistent measurements, particularly for continuous traits that vary among individuals in their environments, presenting a major challenge that requires collaboration and coordinated efforts to address.
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  • Evading predators is essential for prey animals, with traits like crypsis (camouflage), activity levels, and speed impacting survival against attacks, but findings often come from artificial situations.
  • This study analyzed how body traits of 34 butterfly species in an African forest affected predation risk by measuring wing damage from failed predator attacks, representing a natural context for these interactions.
  • Results showed faster-flying male butterflies had less wing damage, while there was no link between coloration and damage, and male activity levels affected wing damage symmetry compared to females.
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Suaeda salsa is a pioneer species in coastal wetlands of East Asia and recently an ecosystem engineer species, Phragmites australis, has started to enter into S. salsa communities owing to either autogenic or external drivers. The consequences of this phenomenon on the ecosystem functions of coastal wetlands are still unclear, especially for decomposition processes.

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Plants produce a high diversity of metabolites which help them sustain environmental stresses and are involved in local adaptation. However, shaped by both the genome and the environment, the patterns of variation of the metabolome in nature are difficult to decipher. Few studies have explored the relative parts of geographical region versus environment or phenotype in metabolomic variability within species and none have discussed a possible effect of the region on the correlations between metabolites and environments or phenotypes.

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Why can hosts coexist with conspecifics or phylogenetically proximate neighbours despite sharing specialist enemies? Do the hosts evolve increased enemy resistance? If so, does this have costs in terms of climatic-stress resistance, or in such neighbourhoods, does climatic-stress select for resistances that are multifunctional against climate and enemies? We studied oak (Quercus petraea) descendants from provenances of contrasting phylogenetic neighbourhoods and climates in a 25-year-old common garden. We found that descendants from conspecific or phylogenetically proximate neighbourhoods had the toughest leaves and fewest leaf miners, but no reduction in climatic-stress resistance. Descendants from such neighbourhoods under cold or dry climates had the highest flavonol and anthocyanin levels and the thickest leaves.

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  • Dispersal limitation in animals is thought to decrease with body size, but this study suggests it may actually increase for large, flightless oribatid mites on young trees due to limited aerial dispersal abilities.
  • By connecting branches of young trees to those of old trees, researchers suppressed dispersal limitation and found an increase in community evenness and larger mean body size of mites on young tree branches.
  • The findings indicate that larger body sizes can negatively impact colonization and survival, suggesting that even in connected habitats, larger flightless invertebrates may struggle to disperse effectively.
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For a species to be able to respond to environmental change, it must either succeed in following its optimal environmental conditions or in persisting under suboptimal conditions, but we know very little about what controls these capacities. We parameterized species distribution models (SDMs) for 135 plant species from the Algerian steppes. We interpreted low false-positive rates as reflecting a high capacity to follow optimal environmental conditions and high false-negative rates as a high capacity to persist under suboptimal environmental conditions.

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  • Strong seasonality in environmental conditions and pollinator availability significantly impacts how plants reproduce and flower.
  • The study created a functional trait database for 104 North African steppe plant species to assess how traits related to harsh conditions and pollinator attraction affect flowering times.
  • Key findings indicate that while root depth and certain flower characteristics play a crucial role in determining flowering phenology, many other traits have minimal effects, particularly for shallow-rooted species linked to specific pollinators.
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Plant litter decomposition is a key regulator of nutrient recycling. In a given environment, decomposition of litter from a focal species depends on its litter quality and on the efficiency of local decomposers. Both may be strongly modified by functional traits of neighboring species, but the consequences for decomposition of litter from the focal species remain unknown.

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Plant litter is an indispensable component of constructed wetlands, but how the submergence of plant litter affects their ecosystem functions and services, such as water purification, is still unclear. Moreover, it is also unclear whether the effects of plant litter submergence depend on other factors such as the duration of litter submergence, water source or litter species identity. Here we conducted a greenhouse experiment by submerging the litter of 7 wetland plant species into three types of water substrates and monitoring changes in water nutrient concentrations.

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Theory suggests that the structure of evolutionary history represented in a species community may affect its functioning, but phylogenetic diversity metrics do not allow for the identification of major differences in this structure. Here we propose a new metric, ELDERness (for Evolutionary Legacy of DivERsity) to estimate evolutionary branching patterns within communities by fitting a polynomial function to lineage-through-time (LTT) plots. We illustrate how real and simulated community branching patterns can be more correctly described by ELDERness and can successfully predict ecosystem functioning.

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Plant leaf litter is an important source of soil chemicals that are essential for the ecosystem and changes in leaf litter chemical traits during decomposition will determine the availability of multiple chemical elements recycling in the ecosystem. However, it is unclear whether the changes in litter chemical traits during decomposition and their similarities across species can be predicted, respectively, using other leaf traits or using the phylogenetic relatedness of the litter species. Here we examined the fragmentation levels, mass losses, and the changes of 10 litter chemical traits during 1-yr decomposition under different environmental conditions (within/above surrounding litter layer) for 48 temperate tree species and related them to an important leaf functional trait, i.

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In arid zones, strong solar radiation has important consequences for ecosystem processes. To better understand carbon and nutrient dynamics, it is important to know the contribution of solar radiation to leaf litter decomposition of different arid-zone species. Here we investigated: (1) whether such contribution varies among plant species at given irradiance regime, (2) whether interspecific variation in such contribution correlates with interspecific variation in the decomposition rate under shade; and (3) whether this correlation can be explained by leaf traits.

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