Biological invasions are a leading threat to biodiversity globally. Increasingly, ecosystems experience multiple introductions, which can have significant effects on patterns of diversity. The way these communities assemble will depend partly on whether rare and common alien species respond to environmental predictors in the same manner as rare and common native species, but this is not well understood. To examine this question across four national parks in south-eastern Australia, we sampled the understory plant community of eucalypt-dominated dry forest subject to multiple plant introductions. The drivers of diversity and turnover in alien and native species of contrasting frequency of occurrence (low, intermediate, and high) were each tested individually. We found alien species diversity and turnover were both strongly associated with abiotic conditions (e.g., soil pH), while distance had little influence because of the greater extent of occurrence and more homogeneous composition of common aliens. In contrast, native species diversity was not associated with abiotic conditions and their turnover was as strongly influenced by distance as by abiotic conditions. In both alien and native species, however, the most important predictors of turnover changed with frequency of occurrence. Although local coexistence appears to be facilitated by life history trade-offs, species richness of aliens and natives was negatively correlated and native species might face greater competition in areas with more neutral soils (e.g., pH > ~5.5) where alien richness and relative frequency were both highest. We conclude that diversity and turnover in the generally more widespread alien species are mainly driven by species sorting along an environmental gradient associated with pH and nutrient availability, whereas turnover of native species is driven by more neutral processes associated with dispersal limitation. We show alien and native plant species respond to different environmental factors, as do rare and common species within each component.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.8734 | DOI Listing |
Ecohealth
January 2025
Guangxi Key Laboratory for Forest Ecology and Conservation, College of Forestry, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi, 530000, People's Republic of China.
Chytridiomycosis is a wildlife disease that has caused significant declines in amphibian populations and species extinctions worldwide. Asia, where the causal pathogens Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and B. salamndrivorans (Bsal) originated, has not witnessed mass die-offs.
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January 2025
State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Key Laboratory of Ecological Safety and Sustainable Development in Arid Lands, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
In the past decades, dozens of invasion hypotheses have been proposed to elucidate the invasion mechanisms of exotic species. Among them, the accumulation of local pathogens hypothesis (ALPH) posits that invasive plants can accumulate local generalist pathogens that have more negative effect on native species than on themselves; as a result, invasive plants might gain competitive advantages that eventually lead to their invasion success. However, research on this topic is still quite insufficient.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The yellow fever mosquito ( ) is an organism of high medical importance because it is the primary vector for diseases such as yellow fever, Zika, dengue, and chikungunya. Its medical importance has made it a subject of numerous efforts to understand their biology. One such effort, was the development of a high-quality reference genome (AaegL5).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEven after folding, proteins transiently sample unfolded or partially unfolded intermediates, and these species are often at risk of irreversible alteration ( via proteolysis, aggregation, or post-translational modification). Kinetic stability, in addition to thermodynamic stability, can directly impact protein lifetime, abundance, and the formation of alternative, sometimes disruptive states. However, we have very few measurements of protein unfolding rates or how mutations alter these rates, largely due to technical challenges associated with their measurement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhytoKeys
January 2025
University of California, Riverside, USA University of California Riverside United States of America.
While investigating the potential for species to hybridize in the mixed populations of Point Sal and Burton Mesa in Santa Barbara County, California, we discovered that from the Nipomo Mesa (San Luis Obispo County), formerly considered a northern population of , are genetically and morphologically distinct. We name this new taxon after the ytt (Northern Chumash language) word for the Nipomo Mesa region. For morphological and molecular analyses, we sampled 54 plants, focusing on , , and from multiple species and comparative single species populations.
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