Regional biogeography versus intra-annual dynamics of the root and soil microbiome.

Background: Root and soil microbial communities constitute the below-ground plant microbiome, are drivers of nutrient cycling, and affect plant productivity. However, our understanding of their spatiotemporal patterns is confounded by exogenous factors that covary spatially, such as changes in host plant species, climate, and edaphic factors. These spatiotemporal patterns likely differ across microbiome domains (bacteria and fungi) and niches (root vs.

Contributions of environmental and maternal transmission to the assembly of leaf fungal endophyte communities.

Leaf fungal endophytes (LFEs) contribute to plant growth and responses to stress. Fungi colonize leaves through maternal transmission, e.g.

Testing for loss of Epichloë and non-epichloid symbionts under altered rainfall regimes.

Premise: Microbial symbionts can buffer plant hosts from environmental change. Therefore, understanding how global change factors alter the associations between hosts and their microbial symbionts may improve predictions of future changes in host population dynamics and microbial diversity. Here, we investigated how one global change factor, precipitation, affected the maintenance or loss of symbiotic fungal endophytes in a C grass host.

Does phylogeny matter? Assessing the impact of phylogenetic information in ecological meta-analysis.

Meta-analysis is increasingly used in ecology and evolutionary biology. Yet, in these fields this technique has an important limitation: phylogenetic non-independence exists among taxa, violating the statistical assumptions underlying traditional meta-analytic models. Recently, meta-analytical techniques incorporating phylogenetic information have been developed to address this issue.