Tag: Ecology

Carbon exist in two stable isotopic forms; 99% as 12C and 1% as 13C. The carbon-fixing enzyme Rubisco preferentially fixes 12C, so fossil fuels are enriched for 12C, and since the industrial revolution the atmospheric 13C / 12C ratio has been increasing as the 12C-enriched fossil fuels are reconverted…

The evolution of flowers solved one of the largest obstacles of plant reproduction, finding a compatible mate. Since plants are sedentary, they are unable to search for a compatible mate like other organisms. Instead they use pollinators to do the searching for them. Flowers use scent and color to attract…

Leaf size varies by over 100,000-fold across the plant kingdom. Leaf area has a direct impact on tissue temperature and thus directly affects photosynthetic efficiency. Empirical observations by 19th century plant geographers described that larger leaves are usually restricted to plants growing in wet…

The soils microbiome is of course hugely complex and immensely variable. Metagenomics tools allow us to describe the diversity of the soil microbiome, but what that diversity means is best grasped when the microbiome is considered in terms of its ecological functions, as described in this Tansley Insight…

DNA sequencing was slow before the development of high throughput sequencing. Portable DNA sequencing, which would make sequencing on-site a reality, was impossible until recently. Parker et al. report on the on-site use of MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies for DNA barcoding, which yields data…

One of the challenges of future food security is to feed a growing population without further impinging on undisturbed ecosystems, which is a primary goal of efforts to increase yields. At the other end of the equation, Tripathi et al. address opportunities to recover degraded lands for sustainable development.…

Local adaptation and plant fitness (how plants perform on those localities) are strongly influenced by the seasonal timing of germination and flowering. Germination timing affects when a plant flowers and the selective environment under which flowering occurs. The other way around is also true, timing…

Parasitic plants such as Cuscuta astralis (dodder) form connections with their host plants through which nutrients and other molecules pass. Using mutant plants and transcriptomic assays, Hettenhausen and Li et al. showed that two or more plants connected by Cuscuta bridges shared information through…