
Kyle W TomlinsonChinese Academy of Sciences | CAS · Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden
Kyle W Tomlinson
PhD
About
119
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2013 - January 2016
July 2007 - June 2013
Publications
Publications (119)
Insect herbivory plays a crucial role in shaping plant communities in many terrestrial ecosystems. However, in African savannas, insect herbivory has been relatively understudied compared to large mammalian herbivory. In this study, we examined the impact of insect herbivory, focusing on leaf chewers and miners, in a South African savanna‐forest mo...
Ants inhabit a vast range of ecosystems and exhibit wide morphology. They are expert navigators employing a handful of well-understood navigational strategies. However, the specific relationships among ant navigation behaviours, ecology, and morphology remain unclear, highlighting the need for comparative studies across diverse species. Here, we co...
XX International Botanical Congress (IBC), Madrid 2024
Poster for Blocking then stinging as a case of two-step evolution of defensive cage architectures in herbivore-driven ecosystems (Nature Plants, 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01649-4)
At the XX IBC (International Botanical Congress), Madrid, 2024.
Evolutionary radiation, a pivotal aspect of macroevolution, offers valuable insights into evolutionary processes. The genus Pinus is the largest genus in conifers with c. 90% of the extant species emerged in the Miocene, which signifies a case of rapid diversification. Despite this remarkable history, our understanding of the mechanisms driving rad...
Dense branching and spines are common features of plant species in ecosystems with high mammalian herbivory pressure. While dense branching and spines can inhibit herbivory independently, when combined, they form a powerful defensive cage architecture. However, how cage architecture evolved under mammalian pressure has remained unexplored. Here we...
Plants have the ability to recognize their kin neighbors, which may be a beneficial trait that increases inclusive fitness, by suppressing individual growth to support the combined growth of the group. However, the advantages of kin cooperation (known as kin selection theory), may differ across environmental gradients, with competition between rela...
Feeding efficiency of mammalian herbivores is associated with skull traits known to differ between feeding guilds. As climate is known to affect the architecture and functional traits of plants, skull morphology may change as plant traits change along climate gradients. We tested whether skull traits of more than 70% of the extant bovid and cervid...
Aim
The aim of this study was to further advance our understanding of the species-rich, and ecologically important angiosperm family Combretaceae to provide new insights into their evolutionary history. We assessed phylogenetic relationships in the family using target capture data and produced a dated phylogenetic tree to assess fruit dispersal mod...
Soil organic matter contributes to productivity in terrestrial ecosystems and contains more carbon than is found in the atmosphere. Yet, there is little understanding of soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration processes during tropical forest succession, particularly after land abandonment from agriculture practices.
Here, we used vegetation and en...
Invasive grasses have spread over large areas of ancient savannas worldwide and have extensively impacted native landscapes in the neotropics. However, our understanding on how the displacement of native by invasive grasses may affect tree-grass coexistence in neotropical savannas is still poor. The present study tested the imposed effects of an in...
In the natural environment, plants grow and interact with both conspecific and het-erospecific neighbours under different environmental conditions. In this study, we tested whether Chenopodium quinoa Willd genotypes differ in growth performance when grown with kin and non-kin under nutrient limitation in pot partitioning treatments. Biomass accumul...
Southeast Asia has seen strong climatic oscillations and fluctuations in sea levels during the Quaternary. The impact of past climate changes on the evolution and distribution of local flora in Southeast Asia is still poorly understood. Here we aim to infer how the Quaternary climate change affects the evolutionary process and range shifts in two p...
Plants utilize a mixture of defence types in response to herbivores, including physical, chemical and biological defences. Among chemical defences, phenolics are well‐known to inhibit digestion and are highly variable across plant species and resource gradients. There are prominent hypotheses predicting the potential change of phenolics in response...
Aim
Plant herbivory and disease, which are often associated with each other but subject to different processes, are pivotal in biodiversity maintenance and ecosystem function. Although drivers of plant herbivory and disease have been widely studied separately, their relationships, patterns and determinants remain unclear in fragmented landscapes....
Background and aims:
Plants have evolved various defences against herbivores, including direct chemical and structural defences and co-opted biological defences by predatory insects. However, the effects of abiotic habitat conditions on the quantitative expression of defence traits of spiny species have not been elucidated.
Methods:
Here, we inv...
Decomposition rates of litter mixtures reflect the combined effects of litter species diversity, litter quality, decomposers, their interactions with each other and with the environment. The outcomes of those interactions remain ambiguous and past studies have reported conflicting results (e.g., litter mixture richness effects). To date, how litter...
Karst habitats are hotspots of diversity and endemism. Their naturally fragmented distributions across broad geographic landscapes have led to the complex array of smaller evolutionary ecosystems that present unique challenges from a conservation perspective. Comprehensive biodiversity assessments of karst habitats have revealed that these ecosyste...
Farmland birds are declining globally due to anthropogenic activities, with particularly few studies in Asian agricultural landscapes. Various studies have examined the impacts of landscape heterogeneity on farmland bird composition, but few have considered seasonal changes in bird diversity and examined functional feeding guild assemblages. Here,...
Lianas account for a small fraction of forest biomass, but their contribution to leaf or litter biomass and thus to food webs can be substantial. Globally liana exhibit fast life‐history traits. Thus, liana litter may decompose faster than tree litter, and could enhance the decomposition of tree litter (complementarity effect). The differences in d...
The role of mammal herbivory in plant evolution is largely unrecognised. Spines on stems are a common and important feature found in ~9% of eudicot woody plant species worldwide. Spines evolved independently multiple times during the Cenozoic. The timing and extent of spiny plant diversification varied among continents, pointing towards continental...
Spinescence is an important functional trait possessed by many plant species for physical defence against mammalian herbivores. The development of spinescence must have been closely associated with both biotic and abiotic factors in the geological past, but knowledge of spinescence evolution suffers from a dearth of fossil records, with most studie...
Invasive grasses have spread over large areas of ancient savannas worldwide and have extensively impacted native landscapes in the neotropics. However, our understanding on how the displacement of native by exotic grasses may affect tree-grass coexistence in neotropical savannas is still poor. The present study tested the imposed effects of an exot...
In the present study, we examined fine root production and soil available nutrients (N, P and K) across different soil depths in rubber monoculture and rubber–Flemingia macrophylla agroforestry of different stand ages. We used the ingrowth cores method and sampled 360 soil cores over four growth intervals, representing one year of growth for the pr...
Premise:
Exploring how functional traits vary and covary is important to understand plant responses to environmental change. However, we have limited understanding of the ways multiple functional traits vary and covary within invasive species.
Methods:
We measured 12 leaf traits of an invasive plant Chromolaena odorata, associated with plant or...
Background and Aims
The defensive role of spines has previously been related to leaves, young shoots, and reproductive organs. However, some woody species harbour spines on their trunks where none of those organs are present. Several explanations are plausible: they could be 1- climbing aids, 2- remnants from defence of leaves or reproductive organ...
Yunnan Province, southwest China, has a monsoonal climate suitable for a mix of fire-driven savannas and fire-averse forests as alternate stable states, and has vast areas with savanna physiognomy. Presently, savannas are only formally recognised in the dry valleys of the region, and a no-fire policy has been enforced nationwide since the 1980s. Mi...
The cover image is based on the Letter Hydraulic prediction of drought‐induced plant dieback and top-kill depends on leaf habit and growth form by Ya‐Jun Chen et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13856.
We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of values of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 448 traits across 28,640 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxon descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of per...
The Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau in southwest China lies at the intersection between East and South Asia, and is characterized by highly complex vegetation ranging from subtropical forest to open grassland. There is a long history of human modification to the landscape, but we know surprisingly little of the biogeography of open habitats such as grassy b...
Hydraulic failure caused by severe drought contributes to aboveground dieback and whole-plant death. The extent to which dieback or whole-plant death can be predicted by plant hydraulic traits has rarely been tested among species with different leaf habits and/or growth forms. We investigated 19 hydraulic traits in 40 woody species in a tropical sa...
Premise
To further advance the understanding of the species-rich, economically and ecologically important angiosperm order Myrtales in the rosid clade, comprising nine families, approximately 400 genera and almost 14,000 species occurring on all continents (except Antarctica), we tested the Angiosperms353 probe kit.
Methods
We combined high-throug...
Plant architecture strongly influences ecological performance, yet its role in plant evolution has not been explored in depth. By testing both phylogenetic and environmental signals, it is possible to separate architectural traits into four categories: development constraints (phylogenetic signal only); convergences (environmental dependency only);...
We introduce the AusTraits database - a compilation of measurements of plant traits for taxa in the Australian flora (hereafter AusTraits). AusTraits synthesises data on 375 traits across 29230 taxa from field campaigns, published literature, taxonomic monographs, and individual taxa descriptions. Traits vary in scope from physiological measures of...
We present new records of Ichthyophis elongatus Taylor, 1965 in West Sumatra. These records extend the known distribution of the species which was previously only known from the type locality in Padang, West Sumatra. We assess the morphology and habitats of this species and estimate its distribution. Predicted distribution based on maximum entropy...
Vegetation in tropical Asia is highly diverse due to large environmental gradients and heterogeneity of landscapes. This biodiversity is threatened by intense land use and climate change. However, despite the rich biodiversity and the dense human population, tropical Asia is often underrepresented in global biodiversity assessments. Understanding h...
Given that the rate of resource capture constrains plant growth and defence, understanding the linkage between the leaf economic spectrum (LES) and defence and how it contributes to growth is central to predicting species performance. In spite of the prevalence of spiny plants in many plant communities, little is known about how the LES relates to...
Hunting and deforestation are the two biggest threats to vertebrates in Southeast Asia. In the last 50 years, monoculture rubber plantations replaced large areas of tropical rainforests in Xishuangbanna, southwest China. We set up camera traps at 109 stations (57 in forest reserves and 52 in rubber plantations) to determine the distribution of mamm...
We examined both historical (1960s) and recent (2017) specimens of an insectivorous bat species (Hipposideros armiger) and a phytophagous bat (Rousettus leschenaultii) from the same latitudinal range to explore phenotypic responses to environmental change in China over the past 65 years. Hipposideros armiger exhibited significant increases in forea...
Understanding the effects of the demographic dynamics and environmental heterogeneity on the genomic variation of forest species is important not only for uncovering the evolutionary history of the species but also for predicting their ability to adapt to climate change. In this study, we combined a common garden experiment with range‐wide populati...
Species exposed to anthropogenic climate change can acclimate, adapt, move, or be extirpated. It is often assumed that movement will be the dominant response, with populations tracking their climate envelopes in space, but the numerous species restricted to specialized substrates cannot easily move. In warmer regions of the world, such edaphic spec...
Functional trait variation of plant species includes both inter- and intraspecific variation; however, trait-based plant ecology generally considers only interspecific variation while ignoring intraspecific variation. One reason for this neglect is that intraspecific variation may be negligible when compared to interspecific variation; however, dir...
Background and aims:
Herbivory by large mammals imposes a critical recruitment bottleneck on plants in many systems. Spines defend plants against large herbivores and how early they emerge in saplings may be one of the strongest predictors of sapling survival in herbivore-rich environments. Yet little effort has been directed at understanding the...
Aim
A better understanding of plant communities can be achieved by incorporating data of traits and dynamics into surveys. Wood density is a good predictor for growth and mortality in trees, but to date, no studies of lianas include all three. We examine how liana communities respond to environmental gradients and forest fragmentation in terms of a...
Spines defend plants against large herbivores and how early they emerge in saplings may have significant on species’ ecological performance. Yet little effort has been directed at understanding the variability in early spine emergence and how it affects sapling growth. We present a common garden multi-species study examining 1) what factors account...
Despite the extensive, ongoing conversion of tropical forests to rubber plantation, the effects of this land use change on soil fungal community diversity and composition are still poorly known. We compared a network of sites of tropical forest in southern Yunnan, China, with a network of rubber plantation sites originally derived from this forest....
Aims Savannahs depend on fire for their persistence. Fire influences regeneration from seeds in several ways: it converts the environment into a more open space which can benefit the establishment of seedlings, and fire itself can also enhance germination by chemical and physical cues, such as smoke and heat. There is limited information as to how...
Seasonally dry forest with a deciduous canopy is a widespread ecosystem in Southeast Asia. Debate continues about whether this vegetation is forest or savanna. Savannas have tree cover <60%, C4-dominated ground vegetation, and frequent fires. Forests have tree cover >70%, C3-dominated ground vegetation, and infrequent fires. We studied three commun...
Tectona grandis (teak) is widely planted as high‐quality timber in the seasonal tropics, yet detailed data on its seasonal water use and the effect of climatic fluctuations on its transpiration behavior are limited. We measured sap flux density (SFD) using Granier's sap flow sensors for three wet and two dry seasons in the years 2012, 2014, and 201...
Tropical rainforests play important roles in carbon sequestration and are hot spots for biodiversity. Tropical forests are being replaced by rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) plantations, causing widespread concern of a crash in biodiversity. Such changes in aboveground vegetation might have stronger impacts on belowground biodiversity. We studied tropic...
Changes in savanna tree species composition, both within landscapes and across climatic gradients, suggest that species differ in their ability to utilize resources and cope with grass competition. Linking trait variation among species to their relative performance under resource limitation and competition treatments could provide mechanistic under...
Background: Forest and savanna vegetation in the zone of transition (ZOT) contain distinct woody species due to fire, drought and herbivory barriers that constrain forest species from invading adjacent savannas and vice-versa. Little is known if these barriers cause divergence in species composition between the overstorey and understorey strata in...
Our understanding of the patterns of plant diversity in tropical forests and their responses to fragmentation are mostly based on tree surveys. But are these patterns and responses representative of other plant life-forms? We sampled trees, lianas, herbs, and ferns in a fragmented tropical forest landscape in South-west China. We compared community...
Our understanding of the patterns of plant diversity in tropical forests and their responses to fragmentation are mostly based on tree surveys. But are these patterns and responses representative of other plant life-forms? We sampled trees, lianas, herbs, and ferns in a fragmented tropical forest landscape in South-west China. We compared community...
The litter layer of tropical forests supports a significant fraction of total arthropod diversity and decomposition of this layer is the main pathway by which nutrients are returned to the soil and CO 2 to the atmosphere. Conversion of tropical forests to agriculture is the main threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services, and understanding effec...