Lalasia Bialic-Murphy

Lalasia Bialic-Murphy
ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Institute of Integrative Biology, Global Ecosystem Ecology Group

PhD

About

35
Publications
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Introduction
I focus on collaborative work to develop, synthesize, and communicate robust science that can inform conservation management. I am particularly interested in identifying the underpinning mechanisms that structure ecosystem composition and evaluate the strength of plant-environmental interactions on population dynamics, using a combination of manipulative field experiments, mathematical modeling, and statistical approaches.

Publications

Publications (35)
Article
Full-text available
Rare species across taxonomic groups and biomes commonly suffer from multiple threats and require intensive restoration, including population reintroduction and threat control. Following reintroduction, it is necessary to identify what level of threat control is needed for species to persist over time. Population reintroduction and threat control a...
Article
Environmental conditions impose restrictions and costs on reproduction. Multiple reproductive options exist when increased reproductive costs drive plant populations toward alternative reproductive strategies. Using four years of demographic data across a deer impact gradient, where deer alter the abiotic environment, we parameterize a size-depende...
Article
Full-text available
Due to massive energetic investments in woody support structures, trees are subject to unique physiological, mechanical, and ecological pressures not experienced by herbaceous plants. Despite a wealth of studies exploring trait relationships across the entire plant kingdom, the dominant traits underpinning these unique aspects of tree form and func...
Article
Full-text available
The degree to which elevated CO2 concentrations (e[CO2]) increase the amount of carbon (C) assimilated by vegetation plays a key role in climate change. However, due to the short‐term nature of CO2 enrichment experiments and the lack of reconciliation between different ecological scales, the effect of e[CO2] on plant biomass stocks remains a major...
Article
Tree growth and longevity trade-offs fundamentally shape the terrestrial carbon balance. Yet, we lack a unified understanding of how such trade-offs vary across the world’s forests. By mapping life history traits for a wide range of species across the Americas, we reveal considerable variation in life expectancies from 10 centimeters in diameter (r...
Article
Full-text available
The density of wood is a key indicator of the carbon investment strategies of trees, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here we analyse information from 1.1 mil...
Article
Full-text available
Aim: Ecological and anthropogenic factors shift the abundances of dominant and rare tree species within local forest communities, thus affecting species composition and ecosystem functioning. To inform forest and conservation management it is important to understand the drivers of dominance and rarity in local tree communities. We answer the follow...
Article
Full-text available
The emergence of alternative stable states in forest systems has significant implications for the functioning and structure of the terrestrial biosphere, yet empirical evidence remains scarce. Here, we combine global forest biodiversity observations and simulations to test for alternative stable states in the presence of evergreen and deciduous for...
Preprint
Full-text available
Theory and experiments show that diverse ecosystems often have higher levels of function (for instance, biomass production), yet it remains challenging to identify the biological mechanisms responsible. We synthesize developments in coexistence theory into a general theoretical framework linking community coexistence to ecosystem function. Our fram...
Preprint
Full-text available
The density of wood is a key indicator of trees’ carbon investment strategies, impacting productivity and carbon storage. Despite its importance, the global variation in wood density and its environmental controls remain poorly understood, preventing accurate predictions of global forest carbon stocks. Here, we analyze information from 1.1 million...
Preprint
Full-text available
Quantifying biodiversity across the globe is critical for transparent reporting and assessment under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Understanding the full complexity of biodiversity requires consideration of the variation of life across genetic, species and ecosystem levels. Achieving this in a globally-standardized way remains...
Article
Full-text available
Rapid technological advancements and increasing data availability have improved the capacity to monitor and evaluate Earth's ecology via remote sensing. However, remote sensing is notoriously ‘blind’ to fine‐scale ecological processes such as interactions among plants, which encompass a central topic in ecology. Here, we discuss how remote sensing...
Article
Full-text available
Challenges facing societies around the globe as they plan for and adapt to climate change are so large that usable, research‐driven recommendations to inform management actions are urgently needed. We sought to understand factors that influence the variation of academic contribution and use of collaborative research on climate change. We surveyed r...
Article
Full-text available
The growing-season length of temperate and boreal trees has a strong effect on the global carbon cycle. Yet, a poor understanding of the drivers of phenological processes, such as autumn leaf senescence in deciduous trees, limits our capacity to estimate growing-season lengths under climate change. While temperature has been shown to be an importan...
Article
Full-text available
The reintroduction of rare species in natural preserves is a commonly used restoration strategy to prevent species extinction. An essential first step in planning successful reintroductions is identifying which life stages (e.g., seeds or large adults) should be used to establish these new populations. Following this initial establishment phase, it...
Preprint
Full-text available
A bstract Due to massive energetic investments in woody support structures, trees are subject to unique physiological, mechanical, and ecological pressures not experienced by herbaceous plants. When considering trait relationships across the entire plant kingdom, plant trait frameworks typically must omit traits unique to large woody species, there...
Article
Full-text available
Despite widespread evidence that biological invasion influences both the biotic and abiotic soil environments, the extent to which these two pathways underpin the effects of invasion on plant traits and performance remains unknown. Leveraging a long‐term (14‐year) field experiment, we show that an allelochemical‐producing invader affects plants thr...
Article
Full-text available
Invasive species utilize a wide array of trait strategies to establish in novel ecosystems. Among these traits is the capacity to produce allelopathic compounds that can directly inhibit neighboring native plants or indirectly suppress native plants via disruption of beneficial belowground microbial mutualisms. Despite the well-known prevalence of...
Article
Full-text available
The mechanisms causing invasive species impact are rarely empirically tested, limiting our ability to understand and predict subsequent changes in invaded plant communities. Invader disruption of native mutualistic interactions is a mechanism expected to have negative effects on native plant species. Specifically, disruption of native plant‐fungal...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Climates are changing at a rate that exceeds the adaptive capacity of species, especially endangered species. Genetic variation and phenotypic plasticity are important for population persistence, yet few studies have linked traits to seedling performance under drought in endangered species. Aims: We assessed intraspecific variation and...
Article
Full-text available
Biodiversity patterns emerge as a consequence of evolutionary and ecological processes. Their relative importance is frequently tested on model ecosystems such as oceanic islands that vary in both. However, the coarse-scale data typically used in biogeo- graphic studies have limited inferential power to separate the effects of historical biogeograp...
Article
Full-text available
The direct role of non‐native plant invaders in driving negative population‐ and community‐level processes of native species has been recently questioned. Addressing this controversy requires determining quantitatively if invaders negatively affect native population fitness. Because the invasion of non‐natives often coincides with other anthropogen...
Data
Overview | This file uses parameter estimates calculated in a separate R script (not provided in our supplement) and builds three integral projection models (one at each level of deer impact). Using the component matrices of the discretized kernel matrix K=P+F+C, this script also projects even-aged cohorts of either newborn seedlings or clones usin...
Article
Full-text available
Background This data paper provides a description of OpenNahele, the open Hawaiian forest plot database. OpenNahele includes 530 forest plots across the Hawaiian archipelago containing 43,590 individuals of 185 native and alien tree, shrub and tree fern species across six islands. We include estimates of maximum plant size (D95 0.1 and D max3 ) fo...
Article
Full-text available
1. Climate projections forecast more extreme inter-annual climate variability over time, with an increase in the severity and duration of extreme drought and rainfall events. Based on bioclimatic envelope models, it is projected that changing precipitation patterns will drastically alter the spatial distributions and density of plants and be a prim...
Article
Full-text available
1. Understanding of the role of environmental change in the decline of endangered species is critical to designing scale-appropriate restoration plans. For locally endemic rare plants on the brink of extinction, frugivory can drastically reduce local recruitment by dispersing seeds away from geographically isolated populations. Dispersal of seeds a...
Article
Full-text available
Large-scale rodent control can help to manage endangered species that are vulnerable to invasive rodent consumption. A 26 ha rodent snap-trap grid was installed in montane forest on Oahu Island, Hawaii, in order to protect endangered snails and plants. To assess the effectiveness of this trapping operation in reducing fruit consumption and seed pre...
Data
Full-text available
Large-scale rodent control reduces pre-and post-dispersal seed predation of the endangered Hawaiian lobeliad, Cyanea superba subsp. superba (Campanulaceae)

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