Daniel Eric Stanton

University of Minnesota Twin Cities | UMN · Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour

A core vulnerability in symbioses is the need for coordination between the symbiotic partners, which are often assumed to be closely physiologically integrated. We critically re-examine this assumed integration between symbionts in lichen symbioses, recovering a long overlooked yet fundamental physiological asymmetry in carbon balance. We examine t...

This article comments on: Martine Borge and Christopher J. Ellis, Interactions of moisture and light drive lichen growth and the response to climate change scenarios: experimental evidence for Lobaria pulmonaria, Annals of Botany, Volume 134, Issue 1, 3 July 2024, Pages 43–57 https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcae029

Bryophytes, including the lineages of mosses, liverworts, and hornworts, are the second‐largest photoautotroph group on Earth. Recent work across terrestrial ecosystems has highlighted how bryophytes retain and control water, fix substantial amounts of carbon (C), and contribute to nitrogen (N) cycles in forests (boreal, temperate, and tropical), t...

Functional traits are critical tools in plant ecology for capturing organism–environment interactions based on trade‐offs and making links between organismal and ecosystem processes. While broad frameworks for functional traits have been developed for vascular plants, we lack the same for bryophytes, despite an escalation in the number of studies o...

Premise Methods to evaluate lichen thalli hydrophobicity have previously been described, but only recently has hydrophobicity been shown to be an important functional trait related to water regulation dynamics that could be used to predict future climate change effects. We describe a novel protocol to measure lichen thallus hydrophobicity that aims...

Dryland mosses provide many ecosystem functions but are the most vulnerable of biocrust organisms to climate change due to sensitive water relations particularly stressed by summer aridity. However, potential mitigating roles of habitat buffering on moss aridity exposure and stress resistance remain largely unexplored. We predicted the most buffere...

Carbon‐concentrating mechanisms (CCMs) are a widespread phenomenon in photosynthetic organisms. In vascular plants, the evolution of CCMs ([C44‐carbon compound] and crassulacean acid metabolism [CAM]) is associated with significant shifts, most often to hot, dry and bright, or aquatic environments. If and how CCMs drive distributions of other terre...

Lichens are one of the most iconic and ubiquitous symbioses known, widely valued as indicators of environmental quality and, more recently, climate change. Our understanding of lichen responses to climate has greatly expanded in recent decades, but some biases and constraints have shaped our present knowledge. In this review we focus on lichen ecop...

Premise: The long-term potential for acclimation by lichens to changing climates is poorly known, despite their prominent roles in forested ecosystems. Although often considered "extremophiles", lichens may not readily acclimate to novel climates well beyond historical norms. In a previous study (Smith et al. 2018), Evernia mesomorpha transplants...

Mountain top environments are particularly vulnerable to climate change effects, given that biological organisms in these systems live at specific temperature conditions. The poikilohydric nature of lichens emphasizes variables like water holding capacity (WHC) and the hydrophobicity of the thallus to understand the species occupational patterns in...

We propose that a qualitative trait approach based on more detailed nuanced traits may reveal previously overlooked patterns, especially when combined with phylogenetic perspectives. By sampling epiphytic lichens and using a functional approach based on nuanced qualitative traits, such as a much greater resolution over photobiont identity, type of...

Lichens are the symbiotic outcomes of open, interspecies relationships, central to which are a fungus and a phototroph, typically an alga and/or cyanobacterium. The evolutionary processes that led to the global success of lichens are poorly understood. In this review, we explore the goods and services exchange between fungus and phototroph and how...

We propose that a qualitative trait approach based on more detailed nuanced traits may reveal previously overlooked patterns, especially when combined with phylogenetic perspectives. By sampling epiphytic lichens and using a functional approach based on nuanced qualitative traits, such as a much greater resolution over photobiont identity, type of...

Several racial and ethnic identities are widely understood to be under-represented within academia, however, actual quantification of this under-representation is surprisingly limited. Challenges include data availability, demographic inertia and identifying comparison points. We use de-aggregated data from the U.S. National Science Foundation to c...

There is a great need to understand how and why biodiversity, which we define as the variety of organisms found in a given place, changes over time. Current estimates suggest strikingly slow change in traditional measures of biodiversity. These estimates seem to contradict rapid shifts in the abundance of individual species and have led to a rethin...

Movement is a widespread behavior across organisms and is driven in part by interspecific interactions. Generally, negative interspecific interactions (such as competition and natural enemies) are more often studied in the context of movement than positive interactions (mutualism). Mutualistic relationships are incredibly common, yet only a subset...

Epiphytes, including bryophytes and lichens, can significantly change the water interception and storage capacities of forest canopies. However, despite some understanding of this role, empirical evaluations of canopy and bole community water storage capacity by epiphytes are still quite limited. Epiphyte communities are shaped by both microclimate...

Since the late Cambrian era, bryophytes have been shaping terrestrial ecosystems through unique and diverse suites of anatomical, physiological, and morphological traits. In this review we highlight historical and recent work in bryophyte functional ecology, with an emphasis on knowledge gaps and opportunities for future work. While we cannot alway...

There were errors in the name of author László G. Nagy and in affiliation no. 31 in the original publication. The original article has been corrected.

The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identiication of the guild in environmental studies. Over the past decades, rapid development and afordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved insights of the fungal diversity in all ecosystems and habitats. Yet, in spite of the progress of molecular methods, knowledge about f...

Epiphytic lichens directly exposed to atmospheric conditions can help detect how diffuse but pressing global changes may impact regional forest health. For 388 plots in the U.S. Midwest region, we developed indices for climate and air quality based on variation in tree-dwelling macrolichen community compositions (NMS ordination scores), species ind...

The global expansion of tree plantations is often claimed to have positive effects for mitigating global warming, preventing soil erosion, and reducing biodiversity loss. However, questions remain unanswered about the impacts of plantations on belowground diversity and soil properties. Here, we examine how forestry plantations of exotic trees affec...

Epiphytic lichens play a key hydrological role in ecosystems by intercepting and retaining water. These attributes can be characterized at an individual thallus scale by considering the retention and loss rates of water, themselves influenced by growth form and anatomy. We compared the hydrological attributes (water-holding capacity and standard dr...

Biological nitrogen fixation is critical for the nitrogen cycle of tropical forests, yet we know little about the factors that control the microbial nitrogen fixers that colonize the microbiome of leaves and branches that make up a forest canopy. Forest canopies are especially prone to nutrient limitation because they are (1) disconnected from soil...

Understanding changes in biodiversity is a complex subject contingent on many interacting or poorly differentiated processes. As a result, it is desirable to organize processes in community ecology into a small number of high-level mechanisms that completely account for change in ecological communities. It has been suggested that all change in ecol...

Fog oases are zones along the Atacama Desert where the regular input of fog favors the development of rich communities of vascular plants, becoming biodiversity hotspots. In these areas, the lichen biota has been poorly explored and represents one of the most conspicuous elements among the perennials organisms that form the community. In a previous...

In recent years, the study of Palaeolithic people has been a vigorous, productive topic, with the increasing knowledge of diet contributing significantly to the debate's liveliness (e.g. Richards 2009; Henry et al . 2010; Hardy et al . 2012, 2016; El Zaatari et al . 2016).

Parasitic infections are increasingly recognized as influential forces in the migratory behaviors of hosts ranging from butterflies to whales. In aquatic zooplankton, diel vertical migrations (DVMs) are among the most recurrent behaviors with implications for predator-prey interactions, nutrient cycling, and energy flow, yet how parasitism affects...

Morphometric analysis of organisms has undergone a dramatic renaissance in recent years, embracing a range of novel computational and imaging techniques to provide new approaches to phenotypic characterization. These innovations have often developed piece-meal, and may reflect the taxonomic specializations and biases of their creators. In this revi...

Fruticose lichens often live in environments where airflow and atmospheric water input may influence their morphology. Measurements of the "pendulosity" (erect length/total length) of Usnea and Ramalina thalli growing on tall, cylindrical cacti in a fog-influenced desert show local-scale patterns that fit with aerodynamic theory. Windward thalli we...

Protoxylem plays an important role in the hydraulic function of vascular systems of both herbaceous and woody plants, but relatively little is known about the processes underlying maintenance of protoxylem function in long-lived tissues. In the present study, embolism repair was investigated in relation to xylem structure in two cushion plant speci...

Halophytic eudicots are characterized by enhanced growth under saline conditions. This study combines physiological and anatomical analyses to identify processes underlying growth responses of the mangrove Avicennia marina to salinities ranging from fresh- to seawater conditions. Following pre-exhaustion of cotyledonary reserves under optimal condi...

Epiphytes have the potential to modify the canopy environments in which they grow. Accurately evaluating the impact of epiphytes can be challenging, since plants without epiphytes may also otherwise differ from host plants, and experimental removal is impractical and difficult to replicate in many forests. We studied the impacts of epiphytes (prima...

Challenges and initiatives for early career ecologists Recent graduates often experience several years of transitional career development before obtaining permanent employment. Short-term positions may be held during this period in an effort to enhance research and/or teaching skills to improve candidacy for an academic position, for example, or a...

Background/Question/Methods Foliar water uptake has been shown to be an important contribution to plant water balance in an increasing number of taxa. Leaf absorbed water may not only benefit the leaf, but also be translocated to other parts of the plant. This process requires an inversion of the soil-plant-air gradient in water potentials. Since...

Feedbacks between vegetation and resource inputs can lead to the local, self-organization of ecosystem properties. In particular, feedbacks in response to directional resources (e.g., coastal fog, slope runoff) can create complex spatial patterns, such as vegetation banding. Although similar feedbacks are thought to be involved in the development o...

Background/Question/Methods The inter-relations between leaf traits, plant physiology and environmental conditions are central to understanding ecosystem responses global change. Although databases of plant traits have grown extensively in recent years, very little data exists on the response of plant traits to salinity. The Daintree River (Far N...

Edge effects are a major concern in the study and conservation of forest patches. The traditional perspective, derived from patches formed by fragmentation, considers forest edges as intermediates in a gradient between interior and exterior conditions, symmetrically distributed around the core of the patch. We present a more general conceptual mode...

Harvesting of fog water by epiphytes is biomechanically analogous to filter-feeding by aquatic invertebrates. Increased branchiness, as measured by fractal dimensionality, should reflect greater fog-harvesting ability. We documented changes in epiphytic macrolichens across an altitudinal gradient in fog availability in a coastal shrubland in northe...

Predicting impacts of climate change requires an understanding of the sensitivity of species to temperature, including conflated changes in humidity. Physiological responses to temperature and clump-to-air vapour pressure difference (VPD) were compared in two Antarctic moss species, Ceratodon purpureus (Hedw.) Brid. and Schistidium antarctici (Card...

Identification of the causes underlying the under-representation of women and minorities in academia is a source of ongoing concern and controversy. This is a critical issue in ensuring the openness and diversity of academia; yet differences in personal experiences and interpretations have mired it in controversy. We construct a simple model of the...

Background/Question/Methods Feedbacks between vegetation and resource inputs can lead to the local self-organization of ecosystem properties. In particular, feedbacks in response to directional resources can create complex spatial patterns, such as vegetation banding. Fog-water inputs in northern Chile have led to the persistence of relict temper...

Despite growing interest in ecological interactions between predators and pathogens, few studies have experimentally examined the consequences of infection for host predation risk or how environmental conditions affect this relationship. Here we combined mesocosm experiments, in situ foraging data, and broad-scale lake surveys to evaluate (1) the e...

1. We combined ecological surveys, life table studies, microscopy and molecular sequencing to determine the development, ecology, pathology and phylogeny of Polycaryum laeve , an endoparasite of cladocerans. We report the first records of P. laeve from North America, where we have used a polymerase chain reaction primer and microscopic examination...