Plant and Soil - Call for Papers: Special Issue on “Plant facilitation”
Plant and Soil is seeking submissions for a Special Issue on “Plant facilitation” guest edited by Alexandra (Sasha) Wright (California State University, Los Angeles, USA), Kathryn E. Barry (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Christopher Moore (Colby College, USA).
Submissions close 31 May 2024.
Papers accepted for publication in the special issue will be available online shortly after acceptance, and before inclusion in the special issue. All manuscripts will be peer-reviewed by 2-3 independent reviewers and handled by the Guest Editors, in collaboration with the Journal’s Section Editors.
Facilitation, commensalism, and mutualism encompass a broad range of positive interactions, typically studied within and between trophic levels, respectively. Positive interactions with plants can help explain the co-occurrence of two neighboring individuals, the co-existence of populations, and the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Positive species interactions have been studied for thousands of years, beginning at least as early as the development of indigenous food systems.
More recently, and in western science, commensal facilitation has often been studied in plant communities in extreme environments. Larger desert shrubs and cacti can facilitate the germination and early growth of smaller individuals; early colonizer plants can desalinate and protectively shade the substrate for more sensitive species in salt marshes; and cushion plants and shrubs can warm and insulate the environment for establishment of cold sensitive plants in alpine environments. Mutualistic facilitation is often focused on plant/pollinator interactions, seed dispersal, and mutualistic fungal relationships.
Modern facilitation research focuses more on mechanisms: the role of microclimate amelioration, positive interactions via soil microbes, and higher-order interactions with other trophic levels. There is also a shift from focusing on two-way interactions (beneficiary/benefactor) towards higher order interactions and whole-community effects. Despite large advances in this field, facilitation is still underemphasized in the literature compared with studies on competition.
This broad special issue aims to gather studies on the mechanisms underlying positive interactions between plants. We welcome studies examining coexistence, biodiversity-ecosystem functioning, successional change, as well evolutionary examinations of facilitation, mutualism, and commensalism. We also examine theoretical and/or modelling work, but we’d like to see strong connections to ecological or evolutionary mechanisms.
Important Submission Information
To submit a manuscript for this special issue, authors should follow the steps below:
1. Authors submit their paper through the following website http://plso.edmgr.com/ (this opens in a new tab)
2. In the Select Article Type step of the online submission procedure, authors must select ‘Special Issue S114 – Facilitation’ from the dropdown box.
3. In the General Information step, authors must specify their Article Category.
Contact
If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact Guest Editor Alexandra (Sasha) Wright (awrigh20@calstatela.edu), Editor in Chief Hans Lambers (hans.lambers@uwa.edu.au) or Managing Editor Lieve Bultynck (plso-plants@uwa.edu.au).