Publications by authors named "Stuart Livingstone"
Article Synopsis
- The genus Vincetoxicum comprises invasive vines in North America that disrupt ecosystems and complicate land management efforts, primarily due to their production of harmful alkaloids.
- Research using advanced metabolomics techniques identified 25 different alkaloids in Vincetoxicum species, helping to establish a biosynthetic pathway that explains their diversity and potential invasiveness.
- Phytotoxic effects of these alkaloids on other plant seedlings were noted, alongside their accumulation in both soil and on damaged leaves, suggesting these compounds play a significant role in ecological interactions and could inform management strategies for controlling these invasive plants.
Article 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.
Increased globalization has accelerated the movement of species around the world. Many of these nonnative species have the potential to profoundly alter ecosystems. The mechanisms underpinning this impact are often poorly understood, and traits are often overlooked when trying to understand and predict the impacts of species invasions on communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcosystem function is the outcome of species interactions, traits, and niche overlap - all of which are influenced by evolution. However, it is not well understood how the tempo and mode of niche evolution can influence ecosystem function. In evolutionary models where either species differences accumulate through random drift in a single trait or species differences accumulate through divergent selection among close relatives, we should expect that ecosystem function is strongly related to diversity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRarity has been a central topic for conservation and evolutionary biologists aiming to determine the species characteristics that cause extinction risk. More recently, beyond the rarity of species, the rarity of functions or functional traits, called functional rarity, has gained momentum in helping to understand the impact of biodiversity decline on ecosystem functioning. However, a conceptual framework for defining and quantifying functional rarity is still lacking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpecies traits influence where species live and how they interact. While there have been many advances in describing the functional composition and diversity of communities, only recently do researchers have the ability to predict community composition and diversity. This predictive ability can offer fundamental insights into ecosystem resilience and restoration.
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