Intraspecific variability of leaf form and function across habitat types.

Trait-based ecology has already revealed main independent axes of trait variation defining trait spaces that summarize plant adaptive strategies, but often ignoring intraspecific trait variability (ITV). By using empirical ITV-level data for two independent dimensions of leaf form and function and 167 species across five habitat types (coastal dunes, forests, grasslands, heathlands, wetlands) in the Italian peninsula, we found that ITV: (i) rotated the axes of trait variation that define the trait space; (ii) increased the variance explained by these axes and (iii) affected the functional structure of the target trait space. However, the magnitude of these effects was rather small and depended on the trait and habitat type.

The optical method based on gas injection overestimates leaf vulnerability to xylem embolism in three woody species.

Plant hydraulic traits related to leaf drought tolerance, like the water potential at turgor loss point (TLP) and the water potential inducing 50% loss of hydraulic conductance (P50), are extremely useful to predict the potential impacts of drought on plants. While novel techniques have allowed the inclusion of TLP in studies targeting a large group of species, fast and reliable protocols to measure leaf P50 are still lacking. Recently, the optical method coupled with the gas injection (GI) technique has been proposed as a possibility to speed up the P50 estimation.

Arable plant communities as a surrogate of crop rhizosphere microbiota.

Soil microbiota is a crucial component of agroecosystem biodiversity, enhancing plant growth and providing important services in agriculture. However, its characterization is demanding and relatively expensive. In this study, we evaluated whether arable plant communities can be used as a surrogate of bacterial and fungal communities of the rhizosphere of Elephant Garlic (Allium ampeloprasum L.

The Impact of Beehive Proximity, Human Activity and Agricultural Intensity on Diptera Diversity in a Mediterranean Mosaic of Agroecosystems, with a Focus on Pest Species.

Diptera, with their participation in pollination, significantly contribute to the maintenance of plant diversity, and they also have great potential for assessing habitat health and preserving it. A decline in their abundance and diversity has been recorded worldwide as a consequence of biotic, abiotic, and anthropic alterations. In addition to pollinators, these orders include agricultural and forestry pests, which are a threat to both cultivated and wild plants that are very important to the economy.

Projections of leaf turgor loss point shifts under future climate change scenarios.

Predicting the consequences of climate change is of utmost importance to mitigate impacts on vulnerable ecosystems; plant hydraulic traits are particularly useful proxies for predicting functional disruptions potentially occurring in the near future. This study assessed the current and future regional patterns of leaf water potential at turgor loss point (Ψ ) by measuring and projecting the Ψ of 166 vascular plant species (159 angiosperms and 7 gymnosperms) across a large climatic range spanning from alpine to Mediterranean areas in NE Italy. For angiosperms, random forest models predicted a consistent shift toward more negative values in low-elevation areas, whereas for gymnosperms the pattern was more variable, particularly in the alpine sector (i.

Connectivity, landscape structure, and plant diversity across agricultural landscapes: novel insight into effective ecological network planning.

Natural habitats in rural and urban areas are increasingly fragmented and altered by human impacts that are limiting the animal and plant dispersal process. Fragmentation and isolation can be reversed by restoring landscape connectivity through effective Ecological Network (EN) planning. However, most of the studies analyzing the influence of connectivity and landscape structure on biodiversity are focused on animals, while the understanding of their interplaying role on plant diversity remains limited.

rasterdiv-An Information Theory tailored R package for measuring ecosystem heterogeneity from space: To the origin and back.

Ecosystem heterogeneity has been widely recognized as a key ecological indicator of several ecological functions, diversity patterns and change, metapopulation dynamics, population connectivity or gene flow.In this paper, we present a new R package-rasterdiv-to calculate heterogeneity indices based on remotely sensed data. We also provide an ecological application at the landscape scale and demonstrate its power in revealing potentially hidden heterogeneity patterns.

A simplified framework for fast and reliable measurement of leaf turgor loss point.

Drought tolerance shapes the distribution of plant species, and it is mainly determined by the osmotic potential at full turgor (π) and the water potential at turgor loss point (Ψ). We provide a simplified framework for π and Ψ measurements based on osmometer determination of π (π). Specifically, we ran regression models to i) improve the predictive power of the estimation of π from π and morpho-anatomical traits; ii) obtain the most accurate model to predict Ψ on the basis of the global relationship between π and Ψ The inclusion of the leaf dry matter content (LDMC), an easy-to-measure trait, in the regression model improved the predictive power of the estimation of π from π.

Teamwork makes the dream work: Disentangling cross-taxon congruence across soil biota in black pine plantations.

Soil plays a fundamental role in many ecological processes, throughout a complex network of above- and below-ground interactions. This has aroused increasing interest in the use of correlates for biodiversity assessment and has demonstrated their reliability with respect to proxies based on environmental data alone. Although co-variation of species richness and composition in forests has been discussed in the literature, only a few studies have explored these elements in forest plantations, which are generally thought to be poor in biodiversity, being aimed at timber production.

Less safety for more efficiency: water relations and hydraulics of the invasive tree Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) Swingle compared with native Fraxinus ornus L.

Invasion of natural habitats by alien trees is a threat to forest conservation. Our understanding of fundamental ecophysiological mechanisms promoting plant invasions is still limited, and hydraulic and water relation traits have been only seldom included in studies comparing native and invasive trees. We compared several leaf and wood functional and mechanistic traits in co-occurring Ailanthus altissima (Mill.

Beneficial effects of restoration practices can be thwarted by climate extremes.

The impacts of climate extremes on species, communities and ecosystems have become critical concerns to science and society. Under a changing climate, how restoration outcomes are affected by extreme climate variables is a largely unknown topic. We analyzed the effects of experimental factors (grazing and sowing of native species), extreme climate events (intense precipitation and extreme temperatures indexes) and their combination on the restoration progress of a dry, calcareous grassland in Tuscany (Italy) with a 1 year before/15 years continuous annual monitoring after, control/impact (BACI) experiment.

Scarce evidence of ozone effect on recent health and productivity of alpine forests-a case study in Trentino, N. Italy.

We investigated the significance of tropospheric ozone as a factor explaining recent tree health (in terms of defoliation) and productivity (in terms of basal area increment, BAI) in 15 ICP Forests level I and one level II plots in alpine forests in Trentino (N. Italy). Mean daily ozone summer concentrations varied between 30 and 72 parts per billion (ppb) leading to large exceedance of concentration-based critical levels set to protect forest trees.

Sampling intraspecific variability in leaf functional traits: Practical suggestions to maximize collected information.

The choice of the best sampling strategy to capture mean values of functional traits for a species/population, while maintaining information about traits' variability and minimizing the sampling size and effort, is an open issue in functional trait ecology. Intraspecific variability (ITV) of functional traits strongly influences sampling size and effort. However, while adequate information is available about intraspecific variability between individuals (ITV) and among populations (ITV), relatively few studies have analyzed intraspecific variability within individuals (ITV).

A new method for quantifying the phylogenetic redundancy of biological communities.

The increasing use of phylogenetic methods in community ecology recognizes that accumulated evolutionary differences among species mirror, to some extent, ecological processes. The scope of this work is thus to propose a new method for the measurement of community-level phylogenetic redundancy, which takes into account the branching pattern of the underlying phylogeny. Like for functional redundancy, a measure of phylogenetic redundancy can be described as a normalized measure in the range (0-1) that relates the observed community-level phylogenetic diversity to the value of a hypothetical assemblage with the same abundance distribution of the focal community in which all species had independent evolution.

Anticipating species distributions: Handling sampling effort bias under a Bayesian framework.

Anticipating species distributions in space and time is necessary for effective biodiversity conservation and for prioritising management interventions. This is especially true when considering invasive species. In such a case, anticipating their spread is important to effectively plan management actions.

Effect of Mud-Bath Therapy on Serum Biomarkers in Patients with Knee Osteoarthritis: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Balneotherapy is one of the most commonly used non-pharmacological approaches for osteoarthritis (OA). Recent data indicate that some biomarkers could be useful to predict OA progression and to assess therapeutic response.

Objectives: To evaluate the effects of mud-bath therapy on serum biomarkers in patients with knee OA.

Forensic botany as a useful tool in the crime scene: Report of a case.

The ubiquitous presence of plant species makes forensic botany useful for many criminal cases. Particularly, bryophytes are useful for forensic investigations because many of them are clonal and largely distributed. Bryophyte shoots can easily become attached to shoes and clothes and it is possible to be found on footwear, providing links between crime scene and individuals.

A new measure of functional evenness and some of its properties.

Functional evenness is increasingly considered an important facet of functional diversity that sheds light on the complex relationships between community assembly and ecosystem functioning. Nonetheless, in spite of its relevant role for ecosystem functioning, only a few measures of functional evenness have been proposed. In this paper we introduce a new measure of functional evenness that reflects the regularity in the distribution of species abundances, together with the evenness in their pairwise functional dissimilarities.

Spatial scales of variation in lichens: implications for sampling design in biomonitoring surveys.

The variability of biological data is a main constraint affecting the quality and reliability of lichen biomonitoring surveys for estimation of the effects of atmospheric pollution. Although most epiphytic lichen bioindication surveys focus on between-site differences at the landscape level, associated with the large scale effects of atmospheric pollution, current protocols are based on multilevel sampling, thus adding further sources of variation and affecting the error budget. We test the hypothesis that assemblages of lichen communities vary at each spatial scale examined, in order to determine what scales should be included in future monitoring studies.

Computing diversity from dated phylogenies and taxonomic hierarchies: does it make a difference to the conclusions?

Recently, dated phylogenies have been increasingly used for ecological studies on community structure and conservation planning. There is, however, a major impediment to a systematic application of phylogenetic methods in ecology: reliable phylogenies with time-calibrated branch lengths are lacking for a large number of taxonomic groups and this condition is likely to continue for a long time. A solution for this problem consists in using undated phylogenies or taxonomic hierarchies as proxies for dated phylogenies.

Old and new challenges in using species diversity for assessing biodiversity.

Although the maintenance of diversity of living systems is critical for ecosystem functioning, the accelerating pace of global change is threatening its preservation. Standardized methods for biodiversity assessment and monitoring are needed. Species diversity is one of the most widely adopted metrics for assessing patterns and processes of biodiversity, at both ecological and biogeographic scales.

Using taxonomic data to assess and monitor biodiversity: are the tribes still fighting?

In this article we review the problems encountered during the use of taxonomic information for the purpose of monitoring biodiversity. These problems encompass the nature of taxonomic data that requires human interpretation in order to be recognised in the field and grouped into well-defined classes such as species. We then briefly discuss some methods that may be utilized in order to minimise these problems.