The type and intensity of land use are important drivers of local aboveground biodiversity. The same holds for arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, but most research effort has been put into natural or, on the other hand, intensively managed habitat types. In this recent study, PhD student Siim-Kaarel Sepp and co-authors investigated the diversity patterns of AM fungi in a range of six common Estonian habitat types that also included semi-natural land use such as alvar grasslands or wooded meadows.

How to measure things? How to measure biodiversity? For organisms which are visible to human eye, detecting them is not an issue, though identifying the species might be. The situation is fully different for organisms we cannot see with our detector (human eye) or in cases when we wish to use other detection systems, such as sequencing DNA obtained from the organisms, and subsequent identification of the sequences.

Last week, the Government of the Republic announced this year’s laureates of the national research awards. ERR Novaator has compiled an overview of what these scientists do.

Award in the field of geology and biology

Academic Ülo Niinemets (born 1970) is a professor with the Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the Estonian University of Life Sciences and has been given the award for his cycle of research works, “Integration and adaptation mechanisms of plant photosynthesis: from foliage gradients to global patterns”.

Genetic differences between regions are usually studied for individual species. However, many species can reproduce with each other. We studied whether gene flow between two closely related sedge species influences regional differences. Our molecular genetic data support considerable gene flow between the species.

Here is hopefully rather complete, alphabetic list of publications from the members of EcolChange from 2017. There are altogether 83 peer-reviewed papers. You can also check the Publications tab, where you can now find the year-by-year publications lists since 2012, together with links to blog posts about some of them (25 publications from 2017 were blogged about).

Oikos Finland held a conference in Helsinki from 31st January to 1st February to celebrate 100 years of Finnish ecology (link to conference home page). EcolChange was represented by Maarja Öpik who was invited to give a plenary lecture. She spoke about AM fungal species pools and dark diversity.

Interactions between communities of plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi shape fundamental ecosystem properties. Experimental evidence suggests that compositional changes in plant and AM fungal communities should be correlated, but empirical data from natural ecosystems is scarce.

Seems like macroecology has finally arrived to a crossroads where it might split so fundamentally, that two or more new disciplines will emerge. Finding global patterns, that would explain the world in one graph, like JH Brown once hoped for: “The promise of macroecology is that very general statistical patterns provide clues the operation of equally general mechanistic processes which govern the structure and dynamics of complex ecological systems.” (Brown 1999). 

Lots of species grow different looking leaves when they are young and adult. For example young conifers look more like little soft brushes rather than the forest giants, and lots of common houseplants look totally different in their natural habitat, because on our windowsills they produce only juvenile leaves (good example is devil`s ivy – Epipremnum aureum). The phenomena of juvenility has been a question for quite some time and we wanted to understand which morphological, anatomical and chemical changes occur in the needles upon juvenile-to-adult transition.

Using ancient DNA, it is possible to study the species and communities that inhabited past landscapes. However, finding more or less intact ancient DNA is challenging because DNA degrades quickly. One possible source of intact ancient DNA is permafrost. The paleoecological research team, led by professor Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with EU project (GOCE-2006-036866) and an international network of researchers, generated an extensive environmental DNA (eDNA) dataset describing past vegetation at sites across the northern high latitudes (Siberia, Alaska and Yukon) during the last 50,000 years. The resulting DNA-based ‘snapshots’ of ancient vegetation showed (see Willerslev et al. 2014) that the composition of high-latitude plant communities has changed considerably during the late Quaternary. Surprisingly, the plant communities that existed prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (pre-LGM, 50-25kY BP) were more diverse, and contained more forbs, than those emerging during (LGM, 25-15ky BP) or since the LGM (post-LGM, <15ky BP).

Intraspecific variability in functional traits has emerged in recent years as a quite important phenomenon. At least in plant ecology. Traditional view in life sciences has promoted between-species differences as much more significant drivers of ecological processes than within-species differences. Even though already Darwin pointed out that competition for resources is the fiercest within a population – individuals with the same niche fighting over the same stuff.

Two papers studying how plants cope with ozone stress were recently published in the journal Plant Cell & Environment.

The first paper estimates the possible protective role of non-glandular and glandular trichomes on the leaf surface against ozone stress. This study analyzes ozone stress resistance of photosynthesis and induction of stress volatiles in 24 species with widely varying trichome characteristics and taxonomy, and demonstrated that the presence of glandular trichomes strongly reduced stomatal ozone uptake and ozone-dependent damage.

Today a year ago we started this blog (with the accompanying Twitter account). So it´s time to sum up our first year of blogging.

Some general stats. We published 69 posts written by 21 different authors, and had 1500 unique visitors with a bit more than 2700 clicks, coming from 63 countries and territories. Our blog has around 150 followers, mostly through Twitter.

In the era of ongoing global change, restoration efforts must lead to self-sustainable ecosystems resilient to environmental changes. Thus, it is necessary that restoration aims at achieving not only target species richness and composition, but also high genetic diversity of plant populations. 

Everyone with keen eyes that has been walking in wooded areas in the recent years must have noticed small growths on tree leaves called galls. Sometimes the infections can be massive, where it is hard to find one healthy leaf for a whole tree. This prompted the idea to study the physiological effects of galls on trees as such intense infections must have consequences. Furthermore, we were interested whether and how do plants protect themselves once they have been infected.

Last week Clarivate Analytics released it´s annual list of top researchers – the ones that are considered most influential among their discipline (link to methodology). Estonia had altogether 7 scientist in that list (compared with last year´s 4), six from from the University of Tartu (TÜ) and one from the Estonian University of Life Sciences (EMÜ), containing more than 3,000 influential natural and social science researchers from around the world. (For example nobody from the other Baltic states, Latvia and Lithuania, made it to the list.)

Two members of the plant ecology team led by Martin Zobel (Maarja Öpik and Guillermo Bueno) were invited as keynote speakers to a symposium on „Mycorrhizal Symbiosis in the Southern Cone of South America“ in Valdivia, Chile (March 6-9). The symposium was organized by our collaborators: Prof. Roberto Godoy and PhD student Cesar Marin (Austral University of Chile) and Patricia Silva Flores (University of Concepcion), among others. The meeting was a relevant gathering point for South American and European mycorrhizal researchers. As a result of the exciting discussions and ideas exchanged, a relevant network initiative started; the South American Mycorrhizal Research Network (https://southmycorrhizas.org/). 

Mycorrhizal symbiosis affects the realized niches of plant species

Mechanisms of coexistence has fascinated ecologists for a long time and one of the proposed ways is minimizing competition by niche differentiation. According to this, to coexist, species must differ in their realized niches (i.e. coexisting species must have distinct resource and habitat requirements). Traditionally, the realized niches are thought to be affected by competitors, but recent hypotheses state that symbiotic relationships could also be important.

The scope of our Centre of Excellence is indeed wide, stretching occasionally to systematics and taxonomy. Here are two rather fresh papers about new species of fungi (though, with fungi things are usually not too fresh…) – one Lactarius with orange cap and white latex, and one Calycina that lives on Pulmonaria lichen.