Isaac Lichter-Marck

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA

Understanding the processes that enable organisms to shift into more arid environments as they emerge is critical for gauging resilience to climate change, yet these forces remain poorly known. In a comprehensive clade-based study, we investigate recent shifts into North American deserts in the rock daisies (Perityleae), a diverse tribe of desert s...

Sheer cliffs on mountains and in deep canyons are among the worlds most iconic landmarks but our understanding of the enigmatic flora that lives in these vertical rock landscapes remains fragmented. In this article, I review and synthesize recent studies on the evolution of specialization onto bare rock and its consequences for plant diversificatio...

Rock daisies (Perityleae; Compositae) are a diverse clade of seven genera and ca. 84 minimum‐rank taxa that mostly occur as narrow endemics on sheer rock‐cliffs throughout the southwest U.S. and northern Mexico. Taxonomy of Perityleae has traditionally been based on morphology and cytogenetics. To test taxonomic hypotheses and utility of characters...

Recent phylogenomic analyses of sequence data from chloroplast and nuclear genomes as well as morphological and cytological analyses resolved long standing phylogenetic uncertainty in the rock daisy tribe (Perityleae; Asteraceae) and support reclassification at the generic level to reflect evolutionary relationships. The previously recognized gener...

Understanding the processes that enable organisms to shift into more arid environments as they emerge is critical for gauging resilience to climate change, yet these forces remain poorly known. In a comprehensive clade-based study, we investigate recent shifts into North American deserts in the rock daisies (tribe Perityleae), a diverse tribe of de...

Here, we describe and illustrate Encelia balandra sp. nov., a new species of Compositae from the Baja Cal-ifornia Peninsula. It is rare and known only from the rocky hills around Puerto Balandra and Pichilingüe, inside the bay of La Paz, in the State of Baja California Sur, Mexico. We determine that this new species has affinities with Encelia, bas...

Taxonomic monographs synthesize biodiversity knowledge and document biodiversity change through recent and geological time for a particular organismal group, sometimes also incorporating cultural and place-based knowledge. They are a vehicle through which broader questions about ecological and evolutionary patterns and processes can be generated an...

Abstract The enemy‐free space hypothesis (EFSH) contends that generalist predators select for dietary specialization in insect herbivores. At a community level, the EFSH predicts that dietary specialization reduces predation risk, and this pattern has been found in several studies addressing the impact of individual predator taxa or guilds. However...

The effects of predator assemblages on herbivores are predicted to depend critically on predator–predator interactions and the extent to which predators partition prey resources. The role of prey heterogeneity in generating such multiple predator effects has received limited attention. Vertebrate and arthropod insectivores constitute two co‐dominan...

Direct and indirect effects of predators are highly variable in complex communities, and understanding the sources of this variation is a research priority in community ecology. Recent evidence indicates that herbivore community structure is a primary determinant of predation strength and its cascading impacts on plants. In this study, we use varia...

The effectiveness of anti-predator traits, such as warning signals and camouflage, has rarely been quantified from a phylogenetic community ecology perspective. Here we use a phylogenetic comparative analysis to test the association between several putative anti-predator traits and bird predation risk in an assemblage of caterpillar species. We syn...

Background/Question/Methods The effects of multiple predator taxa on densities of a shared prey taxon can be additive or non-additive, the latter being either synergistically positive or antagonistic. Most studies show evidence for additive or antagonistic effects, but the underlying mechanisms have received limited study. One prominent hypothesis...

Significance This study shows the far-reaching effects of herbivore dietary specialization on the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of carnivore–herbivore–plant interactions. First, we test the long-standing hypothesis that dietary specialization of insect herbivores mediates the strength of bird predation on herbivores. Accounting for phylogene...

Background/Question/Methods The enemy-free space hypothesis (EFSH) predicts that dietary specialist herbivores are superior to generalists in using host plants for defense or refuge from enemies. The EFSH has received strong support from herbivore community-level tests with generalist predators, especially predaceous ants. Studies using predaceou...

Background/Question/Methods The enemy-free space hypothesis (EFSH) predicts that dietary specialist herbivores are superior to generalists in using host plants for defense or refuge from enemies. The EFSH has received support from tests with generalist invertebrate predators of insect herbivores. Here, we test the EFSH with respect to bird predat...

We studied aspects of the breeding biology of the poorly known and vulnerable Hennahooded Foliage-gleaner (Hyloctyptus etythrocephalus) in southwest Ecuador. The nests were thick, flattened cups of flexible fibers (n = 3) in a chamber at the end of a tunnel excavated by the adults (n = 17). All but one of the nests was in a nearly vertical muddy ro...