Publications by authors named "Devin R Leopold"

Article Synopsis
  • The conservation community is focusing on recovering species at risk of extinction, particularly in Maui, by implementing climate-resilient recovery plans for 36 native plant species.
  • A tailored spatial conservation prioritization (SCP) approach was developed, emphasizing transparency, flexibility, and expert engagement, consisting of generating multiple prioritization solutions and selecting the best based on expert-agreed criteria.
  • This method reduced the necessary conservation area by 36% while still ensuring high-quality habitats for species, proving more effective than existing tools like prioritizr by enhancing local recovery planning efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Closely related species are expected to have similar functional traits due to shared ancestry and phylogenetic inertia. However, few tests of this hypothesis are available for plant-associated fungal symbionts. Fungal leaf endophytes occur in all land plants and can protect their host plant from disease by a variety of mechanisms, including by parasitizing pathogens (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Ericaceous plants need ericoid mycorrhizal fungi for nutrients, but little is known about the factors affecting these fungal communities.
  • A study in Hawaii used a 4.1-million-year soil chronosequence to investigate how soil age and nutrient availability influence fungal diversity associated with the roots of the native plant Vaccinium calycinum.
  • Results showed increased fungal diversity and species turnover over time, with nutrient fertilization reducing diversity, indicating phosphorus availability plays a more significant role than previously thought.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Ecological communities in older geological regions usually have more species due to a long history of species accumulation and less emphasis on local interactions.
  • A study of root-associated fungi across different ages and species pools revealed that local diversity increases more with richer species pools in older sites.
  • The findings indicate that older species pools exhibit lower functional and phylogenetic diversity, suggesting that species have developed traits that enable them to coexist more effectively in these areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The composition of host-associated microbiomes can have important consequences for host health and fitness [1-3]. Yet we still lack understanding of many fundamental processes that determine microbiome composition [4, 5]. There is mounting evidence that historical contingency during microbiome assembly may overshadow more deterministic processes, such as the selective filters imposed by host traits [6-8].

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Worldwide, native species increasingly contend with the interacting stressors of habitat fragmentation and invasive species, yet their combined effects have rarely been examined. Direct negative effects of invasive omnivores are well documented, but the indirect effects of resource competition or those caused by predator avoidance are unknown. Here we isolated and examined the independent and interactive effects of invasive omnivorous Black rats (Rattus rattus) and forest fragment size on the interactions between avian predators and their arthropod prey.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

High-throughput sequencing of taxon-specific loci, or DNA metabarcoding, has become an invaluable tool for investigating the composition of plant-associated fungal communities and for elucidating plant-fungal interactions. While sequencing fungal communities has become routine, there remain numerous potential sources of systematic error that can introduce biases and compromise metabarcoding data. This chapter presents a protocol for DNA metabarcoding of the leaf mycobiome based on current best practices to minimize errors through careful laboratory practices and validation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Both top-down (grazing) and bottom-up (resource availability) forces can determine the strength of priority effects, or the effects of species arrival history on the structure and function of ecological communities, but their combined influences remain unresolved. To test for such influences, we assembled experimental communities of wood-decomposing fungi using a factorial manipulation of fungivore (Folsomia candida) presence, nitrogen availability, and fungal assembly history. We found interactive effects of all three factors on fungal species composition and wood decomposition 1 year after the fungi were introduced.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Habitat fragmentation is well known to affect plant and animal diversity as a result of reduced habitat area and connectivity, but its effects on microorganisms are poorly understood. Using high-throughput sequencing of two regions of the rRNA gene, we studied the effects of forest area and connectivity on the diversity and composition of fungi associated with the roots of the dominant tree, Metrosideros polymorpha, in a lava-fragmented landscape on the Island of Hawaii. We found that local fungal diversity increased with forest area, whereas fungal species composition was correlated with fragment connectivity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF