Publications by authors named "Benjamin Komac"
Article Synopsis
- Scientists studied how plants use resources at the leaf level and wanted to see if similar patterns happen at the ecosystem level, which is a bigger area with lots of plants and animals.
- They checked if three well-known theories about plant traits matched what happens in communities of plants and their ecosystems by analyzing data from many places.
- They found that the patterns hold true at the ecosystem level, which could help create better models to predict how climate change affects nature.
As Earth's climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimilarity in taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional composition among neighboring 200-kilometer cells (beta-diversity) for angiosperm trees worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSafeguarding Earth's tree diversity is a conservation priority due to the importance of trees for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services such as carbon sequestration. Here, we improve the foundation for effective conservation of global tree diversity by analyzing a recently developed database of tree species covering 46,752 species. We quantify range protection and anthropogenic pressures for each species and develop conservation priorities across taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity dimensions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParasitism is a key factor in the population dynamics of many herbivorous insects, although its impact on host populations varies widely, for instance, along latitudinal and altitudinal gradients. Understanding the sources of geographical variation in host-parasitoid interactions is crucial for reliably predicting the future success of the interacting species under a context of global change. Here, we examine larval parasitism in the butterfly Aglais urticae in south-west Europe, where it is a mountain specialist.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- 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.
Mountain areas are particularly sensitive to climate change. Species distribution models predict important extinctions in these areas whose magnitude will depend on a number of different factors. Here we examine the possible impact of climate change on the Rhododendron ferrugineum (alpenrose) niche in Andorra (Pyrenees).
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