Tree longevity is thought to increase in harsh environments, but global evidence of drivers is lacking. Here, the authors find two different pathways for tree longevity: slow growth in resource limite...

Nature Plants - Eight decades of forest plot monitoring show a pervasive increase in tree mortality across Australia’s forest biomes driven by climate change, jeopardizing their role as...

Understanding the future of ecological communities under global change is among the most pressing challenges in plant ecology. Islands, with their reduced species diversity and clear boundaries, have...

In full sun, tropical leaves can become much hotter than the surrounding air. Their ability to cope can be a matter of life or death.

Ecosystems have many different processes going on. Researchers need to select and simplify, and so development of ecology as a discipline has involved finding different possible ways to select and…

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Climate change is shifting species distributions, leading to changes in community composition and novel species assemblages worldwide. However, the...

Increasing drought pressure under anthropogenic climate change may jeopardize the potential of tropical forests to capture carbon in woody biomass and act as a long-term carbon dioxide sink. To evalua...

Climate warming is likely to be mild for the plants on coastal islands. Although average annual temperatures will increase relative to their current ranges, the hottest annual temperatures will remai....

Amanda Eburneo Martins, Priscilla de Paula Loiola, Daniel Pareja-Bonija, Leonor Patricia Cerdeira Morellato This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be fo…

Tropical forests can vary enormously in their 3D structure and dynamics across surprisingly small spatial scales. However, the drivers that underpin this local-scale variation in forest structure an.....

Trade-offs relating to resource acquisition and conservation, reproduction and longevity generate considerable trait variation among co-occurring tree species, yet little is known about how the natur...

Drought is a growing issue in tropical rainforests. Here, the authors revisit a long-term rainfall manipulation experiment in the Amazon to show that tree mortality was followed by community-level adj...

We demonstrate that key functional traits undergo shifts in their relationship with growth as plants mature. Therefore, it will be valuable to shift our understanding of plant strategies away from th...

New research found regrowth in Queensland provided valuable habitat after 15 years, on average, with some species benefiting from trees as young as 3 years of age.

Tristan A.P. Allerton, Skip J. Van Bloem, German Vargas Gutierrez This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology article which can be found here. Understanding how forests recover after d…

Continental islands have long been used as ecological models for understanding species assembly dynamics in isolated habitat fragments, with direct applications to biodiversity and conservation. But ....

Three experts consider what’s required to protect and conserve Australia’s natural wonders, from fighting invaders to stopping habitat loss and saving species.

Stories of how the data was collected were fascinating. Some people camped on islands for weeks. Some scaled cliffs or jumped from helicopters onto remote islands.

We demonstrate that key functional traits undergo shifts in their relationship with growth as plants mature. Therefore, it will be valuable to shift our understanding of plant strategies away from th...

Data from a variety of sources—including satellite, climate and soil data, as well as field-collected information on plant traits—are pooled and analysed to map the functional diversity of tropical fo...