Background: Body traits are generally controlled by several genes in vertebrates (i.e. polygenes), which in turn make them difficult to identify through association mapping. Increasing the power of association studies ...

The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identification of the guild in environmental studies. Over the past decades, rapid development and affordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved ...

Analyses of functional traits have become fundamental tools for understanding patterns and processes in plant community ecology. In this context, regenerative seed traits play an important, yet overlooked, role because ...

Background The semideciduous Atlantic Forest is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world with a great diversity of spiders. Most spider-related studies in this ecosystem focused on species richness and composition; ...

1. Functional traits provide insight into a variety of ecological questions, yet theoptimal sampling method to estimate the community-level distribution of plantfunctional trait values remains a subject of debate, especially ...

Since root endophytes may ameliorate drought stress, understanding which plants associate with endophytes is important, especially in arid ecosystems. Here, the root endophytes were characterized of 42 plants from an arid ...

Functionally diverse communities can adjust their species composition to altered environmental conditions, which may influence food web dynamics. Trait-based aggregate models cope with this complexity by ignoring details ...

The relationships between functional traits and environmental gradients are useful to identify different community assembly processes. In this work, we used an approach based on functional traits to analyse if changes in ...

How plant functional traits (e.g., seed mass) drive species abundance within communities remains an unsolved question. Borrowing concepts from natural selection theory, we propose that trait-abundance relationships can ...