Background The development and dispersal of seeds as well as their transition to seedlings
represent perhaps the most critical stages of a plant's life cycle. The endophytic and …

We present strong evidence that pathogens play a critical role in structuring plant
communities and maintaining plant diversity. Pathogens mediate plant species coexistence …

Publisher Description (unedited publisher data) An essential textbook for any student or
researcher in biology needing to design experiments, sampling programs or analyse the …

The accumulation of species-specific enemies around adults is hypothesized to maintain
plant diversity by limiting the recruitment of conspecific seedlings relative to heterospecific …

Predominant frameworks for understanding plant ecology have an aboveground bias that
neglects soil micro-organisms. This is inconsistent with recent work illustrating the …

Understanding the relative abundance of species in plant communities is an unsolved
problem,,,,,,,,,. Mechanisms such as competition, resource partitioning, dispersal ability and …

Ecosystem productivity commonly increases asymptotically with plant species diversity, and
determining the mechanisms responsible for this well‐known pattern is essential to predict …

Historically, the role of parasites in ecosystem functioning has been considered trivial
because a cursory examination reveals that their relative biomass is low compared with that …

Plants can change soil biology, chemistry and structure in ways that alter subsequent plant
growth. This process, referred to as plant–soil feedback (PSF), has been suggested to …

Recent hypotheses argue that phylogenetic relatedness should predict both the niche
differences that stabilise coexistence and the average fitness differences that drive …