Marina Fagundes

• Ph.D.
• PostDoc Position at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte

1. Enhancing tree diversity may be important to fostering resilience to drought-related climate extremes. So far, little attention has been given to whether tree diversity can increase the survival of trees and reduce its variability in young forest plantations. 2. We conducted an analysis of seedling and sapling survival from 34 globally distribut...

Plant diversity effects on community productivity often increase over time. Whether the strengthening of diversity effects is caused by temporal shifts in species-level overyielding (i.e., higher species-level productivity in diverse communities compared with monocultures) remains unclear. Here, using data from 65 grassland and forest biodiversity...

Understanding how savanna soil properties influence vegetation diversity and function is a major challenge in ecological studies. We investigated the effects of soil properties on woody species density, richness, composition, and vegetative phenology (inferred by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)) in two alluvial and two interfluvia...

Purpose of Review International ambitions for massive afforestation and restoration are high. To make these investments sustainable and resilient under future climate change, science is calling for a shift from planting monocultures to mixed forests. But what is the scientific basis for promoting diverse plantations, and what is the feasibility of...

Restoration programmes that promote the functioning of restored ecosystems are in urgent demand. Although several biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments have demonstrated the importance of functional complementarity in enhancing plant community performance, no biodiversity experiment has yet manipulated facilitation to test its co...

Plant functional strategies are well-established for low- and high-stress environments, such as rainforests and deserts. However, in environments with low- and high-stress level fluctuation within years, the relationship between plant functional strategies and their spatial distribution is still poorly understood. We aimed to answer: what are the r...

Functional trait combinations underlie assembly rules of plant communities. In harsh environments, facilitation is widespread but its strength varies greatly between pairs of interacting nurse-target plants. Here, we investigated whether functional traits of potential nurse and target species can jointly predict the sign and strength of their inter...

Environmental filters and functional adjustments of species to local conditions are major determinants of plant communities in stressing habitats. We set out to understand the role of different substrates in functional trait variation in wood plants by investigating key functional traits at the community and intraspecific levels in different types...

Species distribution is strongly driven by local and global gradients in water availability but the underlying mechanisms are not clear. Vulnerability to xylem embolism (P50) is a key trait that indicates how species cope with drought and might explain plant distribution patterns across environmental gradients. Here we address its role on species s...

Plant establishment is a challenge in semiarid environments due to intense and frequent drought periods. The presence of neighboring trees (nurses) can increase the establishment of seedlings (targets) by improving resource availability and microclimate. The nurse effect, however, might vary depending on nurse‐target species combinations but factor...