Defaunation

How do subordinate and dominant species in semi-natural mountain grasslands relate to productivity and land-use change?

Alexandre Buttler, Pierre Rémi Mariotte, Thomas Spiegelberger

Changes in agricultural practices of semi-natural mountain grasslands are expected to modify plant community structure and shift dominance patterns. Using vegetation surveys of 11 sites in semi-natural grasslands of the Swiss Jura and Swiss and French Alps ...

Elsevier Gmbh, Urban & Fischer Verlag2013

Dendritic connectivity controls biodiversity patterns in experimental metacommunities

Andrea Rinaldo, Florian Altermatt, Francesco Carrara

Biological communities often occur in spatially structured habitats where connectivity directly affects dispersal and metacommunity processes. Recent theoretical work suggests that dispersal constrained by the connectivity of specific habitat structures, s ...

National Academy of Sciences2012

Effects of Connectivity and Recurrent Local Disturbances on Community Structure and Population Density in Experimental Metacommunities

Andrea Rinaldo, Florian Altermatt, Francesco Carrara

Metacommunity theory poses that the occurrence and abundance of species is a product of local factors, including disturbance, and regional factors, like dispersal among patches. While metacommunity ideas have been broadly tested there is relatively little ...

Public Library of Science2011

Landscape structure affects dispersal in the greater white-toothed shrew: inference between genetic and simulated ecological distances

Séverine Vuilleumier Varisco

Dispersal is often viewed as a process on which the landscape has little effect. This is particularly apparent in populations’ genetic and ecological studies, where isolation by distance is generally tested using a Euclidean distance between populations. H ...

Elsevier2007

Competitive effects of herbaceous vegetation on tree seedling emergence, growth and survival: does gap size matter?

Alexandre Buttler, Charlotte Vandenberghe

Question: What is the effect of gap size on the seedling emergence, growth and survival of four common tree species in wooded pastures? Location: A pasture in the Jura mountains, Switzerland. Methods: Seeds were sown in a complete three-way factorial desig ...

2006