Filtering effect of temporal niche fluctuation and amplitude of environmental variations on the trait-related flowering patterns: lesson from sub-Mediterranean grasslands.

Timing of flowering is a critical component of community assembly, but how plant traits respond to heterogeneity of resources has been identified mostly through observations of spatial variations. Thus, we performed a trait-based phenological study in sub-Mediterranean grasslands to assess the importance of temporal variation of resources in the species assemblage processes. We found that early flowering species have traits allowing for slow resource acquisition and storage but rapid growth rate.

The evolution of defense mechanisms correlate with the explosive diversification of autodigesting Coprinellus mushrooms (Agaricales, Fungi).

Bursts of diversification are known to have contributed significantly to the extant morphological and species diversity, but evidence for many of the theoretical predictions about adaptive radiations have remained contentious. Despite their tremendous diversity, patterns of evolutionary diversification and the contribution of explosive episodes in fungi are largely unknown. Here, using the genus Coprinellus (Psathyrellaceae, Agaricales) as a model, we report the first explosive fungal radiation and infer that the onset of the radiation correlates with a change from a multilayered to a much simpler defense structure on the fruiting bodies.

Phylogeny and species delimitation in the genus Coprinellus with special emphasis on the haired species.

We inferred the phylogenetic structure and species limits within Coprinellus by using a newly generated multigene alignment of LSU, ITS and β-tubulin sequences. We sampled 154 specimens of 71 species out of ca. 80 known taxa in Coprinellus and inferred phylogenetic relationships by Bayesian MCMC and ML bootstrapping.

Understanding the evolutionary processes of fungal fruiting bodies: correlated evolution and divergence times in the Psathyrellaceae.

Fruiting body evolution is one of the central topics in fungal evolutionary biology. A number of hypotheses have been developed to explain the contemporary diversity of fruiting body forms, but their evaluation has been hampered by the lack of well-sampled data sets and suitable statistical methods. Phylogenetic evidence of the physiological changes that accompany switches in fruiting body type is lacking, and very little is known about the age of major events of fruiting body evolution.