Synthetic microbial communities: Sandbox and blueprint for soil health enhancement.

We summarize here the use of SynComs in improving various dimensions of soil health, including fertility, pollutant removal, soil-borne disease suppression, and soil resilience; as well as a set of useful guidelines to assess and understand the principles for designing SynComs to enhance soil health. Finally, we discuss the next stages of SynComs applications, including highly diverse and multikingdom SynComs targeting several functions simultaneously.

Great tits do not compensate over time for a radio-tag-induced reduction in escape-flight performance.

The use of biologging and tracking devices is widespread in avian behavioral and ecological studies. Carrying these devices rarely has major behavioral or fitness effects in the wild, yet it may still impact animals in more subtle ways, such as during high power demanding escape maneuvers. Here, we tested whether or not great tits () carrying a backpack radio-tag changed their body mass or flight behavior over time to compensate for the detrimental effect of carrying a tag.

Globally, plant-soil feedbacks are weak predictors of plant abundance.

Plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) have been shown to strongly affect plant performance under controlled conditions, and PSFs are thought to have far reaching consequences for plant population dynamics and the structuring of plant communities. However, thus far the relationship between PSF and plant species abundance in the field is not consistent. Here, we synthesize PSF experiments from tropical forests to semiarid grasslands, and test for a positive relationship between plant abundance in the field and PSFs estimated from controlled bioassays.

Community-level interactions between plants and soil biota during range expansion.

Plant species that expand their range in response to current climate change will encounter soil communities that may hinder, allow or even facilitate plant performance. It has been shown repeatedly for plant species originating from other continents that these plants are less hampered by soil communities from the new than from the original range. However, information about the interactions between intra-continental range expanders and soil communities is sparse, especially at community level.

Drought soil legacy overrides maternal effects on plant growth.

Maternal effects (i.e. trans-generational plasticity) and soil legacies generated by drought and plant diversity can affect plant performance and alter nutrient cycling and plant community dynamics.

Analyzing time-ordered event data with missed observations.

A common problem with observational datasets is that not all events of interest may be detected. For example, observing animals in the wild can difficult when animals move, hide, or cannot be closely approached. We consider time series of events recorded in conditions where events are occasionally missed by observers or observational devices.

A recipe for postfledging survival in great tits Parus major: be large and be early (but not too much).

Survival of juveniles during the postfledging period can be markedly low, which may have major consequences on avian population dynamics. Knowing which factors operating during the nesting phase affect postfledging survival is crucial to understand avian breeding strategies. We aimed to obtain a robust set of predictors of postfledging local survival using the great tit (Parus major) as a model species.