Aim: Local effects of ecosystem engineers on biodiversity can scale up to the landscape level, stressing the importance of ecological processes as determinants of species richness at larger spatial scales. In harsh ...

Grouping species may provide some degree of simplification to understand the ecological function of plants on key ecosystem processes. We asked whether groups of plant species based on morpho-chemical traits associated ...

Plant–plant interactions can promote diversification in harsh environments through (1) natural selection producing divergent adaptations to extreme and varying abiotic conditions in plants that grow in the open, or (2) ...

Theory predicts that in more stressful environments, positive plant-plant interactions should be more important than negative ones. For instance, in arid and semiarid regions, amelioration of soil drought produced by the ...

Herbs may affect the recruitment of woody species. However, most studies have evaluated the impact of one particular herb species or the herbaceous layer as a whole. It is less known if different herb species have different ...

Ecological interactions among species, both positive and negative, have a strong influence on the structure of plant communities and their comprehension can contribute to the improvement of techniques for ecological ...

Identifying discontinuous entities within species complexes is a major topic in systematic and evolutionary biology. Comprehensive inventories describing and identifying species rapidly and correctly before they or their ...