An official website of the United States government
Plant specialized metabolites shape plant interactions with the environment including plant–microbe interactions. While we often group compounds into generic classes, it is the precise structure of a compound that creates a specific role in plant–microbe or–pathogen interactions. Critically, the structure guides definitive targets in individual interactions, yet single compounds are not limited to singular mechanistic targets allowing them to influence interactions across broad ranges of attackers, from bacteria to fungi to animals. Further, the direction of the effect can be altered by counter evolution within the interacting organism leading to single compounds being both beneficial and detrimental. Thus, the benefit of a single compound to a host needs to be assessed by measuring the net benefit across all interactions while in each specific interaction. Factoring this complexity for single compounds in plant–microbe interactions with the massive expansion in our identification of specialized metabolite pathways means that we need systematic studies to classify the full breadth of activities. Only with this full biological knowledge we can develop mechanistic, ecological, and evolutionary models to understand how plant specialized metabolites fully influence plant–microbe and plant–biotic interactions more broadly.
more »
« less
Climate Disruption of Plant-Microbe Interactions
Interactions between plants and microbes have important influences on evolutionary processes, population dynamics, community structure, and ecosystem function. We review the literature to document how climate change may disrupt these ecological interactions and develop a conceptual framework to integrate the pathways of plant-microbe responses to climate over different scales in space and time. We then create a blueprint to aid generalization that categorizes climate effects into changes in the context dependency of plant-microbe pairs, temporal mismatches and altered feedbacks over time, or spatial mismatches that accompany species range shifts. We pair a new graphical model of how plant-microbe interactions influence resistance to climate change with a statistical approach to predictthe consequences of increasing variability in climate. Finally, we suggest pathways through which plant-microbe interactions can affect resilience during recovery from climate disruption. Throughout, we take a forward-looking perspective, highlighting knowledge gaps and directions for future research.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10205793
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics
- Volume:
- 51
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1543-592X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 561 to 586
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Mutualistic interactions between plants and pollinators play an important role in supporting biodiversity and ecosystem stability. However, these interactions are increasingly threatened by climate change, which can alter the phenology of species and cause temporal mismatches between interacting partners. Leveraging historical and contemporary datasets collected more than a century apart, we investigated phenological shifts in plants and pollinators and the impact of changes in temporal overlap of the interaction partners on the persistence of their interactions. We found that generally, the onset of flowering and insect activity started earlier and has lasted longer in the present. We also found that greater temporal overlap of plant and pollinator species predicted a higher probability of persistence of their interaction between time periods. Our results document phenological shifts over a century, and emphasize the importance of maintaining phenological matching for the persistence of plant-pollinator interactions. This illustrates the value of historical data sets for understanding long-term ecological dynamics in the face of accelerating environmental change.more » « less
-
Anthropogenic climate change is altering interactions among numerous species, including plants and pollinators. Plant-pollinator interactions, crucial for the persistence of most plant and many insect species, are threatened by climate change-driven phenological shifts. Phenological mismatches between plants and their pollinators may affect pollination services, and simulations indicated that these mismatches may reduce floral resources available to up to 50% of insect pollinator species. Although alpine plants rely heavily on vegetative reproduction, seedling recruitment and seed dispersal are likely to be important drivers of alpine community structure. Similarly, advanced flowering may expose plants to increased risk of frost damage and shifted soil moisture regimes; phenologically advanced plants will experience these environmental factors differently, which may alter their floral resource production. These effects may be dependent upon topography. Some species of alpine plants on the Niwot Ridge have displayed advanced phenology under treatments of advanced snowmelt (Forrester, 2021). However, little is understood about how these differences in distribution and phenology affect pollinator community composition and plant fecundity. Here we strive to examine how experimentally-induced changes in the timing of flowering and number of flowers produced by plants impact plant-pollinator interactions and seed set. We also ask how topography and the number of flowers interact with early snowmelt to affect pollination rates and the diversity of pollinating insects. Finally, we ask how seed set of Geum rossii is affected by pollinator visitation at different times of the season, under experimentally advanced snowmelt versus unmanipulated snowmelt, and with visitation by different insect taxa. In summer 2020, we found that plots with advanced phenology experienced peaks in pollinator visitation rates and pollinator diversity earlier than plots with unmanipulated snowmelt. We expect this to be because of the advanced floral phenology of certain key species in these plots. References: Forrester, C.C. (2021). Advancing, Using, and Teaching Climate Change Ecology Research. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.more » « less
-
Climate change will likely shift plant and microbial distributions, creating geographic mismatches between plant hosts and essential microbial symbionts (e.g., ectomycorrhizal fungi, EMF). The loss of historical interactions, or the gain of novel associations, can have important consequences for biodiversity, ecosystem processes, and plant migration potential, yet few analyses exist that measure where mycorrhizal symbioses could be lost or gained across landscapes. Here, we examine climate change impacts on tree-EMF codistributions at the continent scale. We built species distribution models for 400 EMF species and 50 tree species, integrating fungal sequencing data from North American forest ecosystems with tree species occurrence records and long-term forest inventory data. Our results show the following: 1) tree and EMF climate suitability to shift toward higher latitudes; 2) climate shifts increase the size of shared tree-EMF habitat overall, but 35% of tree-EMF pairs are at risk of declining habitat overlap; 3) climate mismatches between trees and EMF are projected to be greater at northern vs. southern boundaries; and 4) tree migration lag is correlated with lower richness of climatically suitable EMF partners. This work represents a concentrated effort to quantify the spatial extent and location of tree-EMF climate envelope mismatches. Our findings also support a biotic mechanism partially explaining the failure of northward tree species migrations with climate change: reduced diversity of co-occurring and climate-compatible EMF symbionts at higher latitudes. We highlight the conservation implications for identifying areas where tree and EMF responses to climate change may be highly divergent.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Species interactions drive ecosystem processes and are a major focus of global change research. Among the most consequential interactions expected to shift with climate change are those between insect herbivores and plants, both of which are highly sensitive to temperature. Insect herbivores and their host plants display varying levels of synchrony that could be disrupted or enhanced by climate change, yet empirical data on changes in synchrony are lacking. Using evidence of herbivory on herbarium specimens collected from the northeastern United States and France from 1900 to 2015, we provide evidence that plant species with temperature-sensitive phenologies experience higher levels of insect damage in warmer years, while less temperature-sensitive, co-occurring species do not. While herbivory might be mediated by interactions between warming and phenology through multiple pathways, we suggest that warming might lengthen growing seasons for phenologically sensitive plant species, exposing their leaves to herbivores for longer periods of time in warm years. We propose that elevated herbivory in warm years may represent a previously underappreciated cost to phenological tracking of climate change over longer timescales.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-011720-090819
