Tristan Charles-DominiqueInstitute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences IEES-Paris | iEES · Community Diversity and Ecosystem Functioning
Tristan Charles-Dominique
PhD
CNRS permanent researcher
About
57
Publications
29,807
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868
Citations
Introduction
Plants are fun!
Additional affiliations
January 2019 - present
June 2016 - December 2018
March 2015 - March 2016
Education
October 2008 - December 2011
Université de Montpellier 2 (FRANCE) ; Université de Montréal (CANADA)
Field of study
- Plant Ecology
September 2007 - July 2008
Université Montpellier 2 (FRANCE); Université de Montréal (CANADA)
Field of study
- Ecology, Evolution and Environment
Publications
Publications (57)
Typically, savannas experience frequent fires, which limit tree cover and promote flammable grass accumulation, whereas forests form dense canopies that exclude fires by reducing C4-grass fuel loads and creating a humid microclimate. However, extreme fires occasionally burn into forests. Although these are known to kill forest trees and can make re...
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 (phylo-genetic signal only); convergences (environmental dependency only)...
Species growing in fire‐prone savannas usually persist by resprouting from their buds. In this study, we evaluated how various persistence traits allow bud protection for improved survival in fire‐prone ecosystems. Using an integrative morphological and macroanatomical approach, we analyzed how woody plants protect their buds. We tested bud protect...
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...
Tree architectures reflect the main abiotic and biotic selection pressures determining tree growth and survival. Studies have shown that trees growing in herbivore‐dominated ecosystems, such as savannas, develop denser, more divaricate ‘cage’‐like architectures in response to chronic browsing pressure (also known as ‘brown‐world’ architectures). In...
Currently, tools to predict the aboveground and belowground biomass (AGB and BGB) of woody species in Guinean savannas (and the data to calibrate them) are still lacking. Multispecies allometric equations calibrated from direct measurements can provide accurate estimates
of plant biomass in local ecosystems and can be used to extrapolate local esti...
1. Fires in savannas limit tree cover, thereby promoting flammable grass accumulation and fuelling further frequent fires. Meanwhile, forests and thickets form dense canopies that reduce C4‐grass fuel loads and creating a humid microclimate, thereby excluding fires under typical climatic conditions. However, extreme fires occasionally burn into the...
Questions
Species defined as ecosystem engineers (e.g. elephant) are able to strongly shape their habitat. In African savannas, elephants have often been shown to reduce woody plant abundance and diversity. However, recent studies highlight more complex elephant-induced effects on vegetation. Here, we assessed if long-term high elephant densities (...
A longstanding research divide exists in plant ecology: either focus on plant clonality with no ambition to address nonclonal plants, or focus on all plants, ignoring that many ecological processes can be affected by the fact that some plants are clonal while others are not. This gap cascades into a lack of distinction and knowledge about the simil...
Biotic and abiotic disturbances such as frequent wildfires and herbivory contribute to maintain trees and grasses coexistence in savanna ecosystems. In comparison to stems and leaves, exposed to fire and herbivory, the roots, protected by being belowground, are less affected by these disturbances. Therefore, indirect estimation of belowground bioma...
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 functional traits provide a valuable tool to improve our understanding of ecological processes at a range of scales. Previous handbooks on plant functional traits have highlighted the importance of standardising measurements of traits to improve our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes. In open ecosystems (i.e. grasslands, s...
Plant functional traits provide a valuable tool to improve our understanding of ecological processes at a range of scales. Previous handbooks on plant functional traits have highlighted the importance of standardising measurements of traits to improve our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes. In open ecosystems (i.e. grasslands, s...
Dominants are key species that shape ecosystem functioning. Plant dominance is typically assessed on aboveground features. However, belowground, individual species may not scale proportionally in relation to their aboveground dimension. This is especially important in ecosystems where most biomass is allocated belowground, including grassy and shru...
Ideas on hominin evolution have long invoked the emergence from forests into open habitats as generating selection for traits such as bipedalism and dietary shifts. Though controversial, the savanna hypothesis continues to motivate research into the palaeo-environments of Africa. Reconstruction of these ancient environments has depended heavily on...
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...
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...
In this study we explore species richness and traits across two urban gradients in the City of Cape Town. The first is the natural-urban boundary and the second is a socio-economic gradient informed by historical race-based apartheid planning. Plant species and cover were recorded in 156 plots sampled from conservation areas, private gardens, and p...
We reported in November 30, 2018 that a jumping spider, Toxeus magnus, feeds its juveniles with milk and provides extended parental care until they reach sexually maturity. Benoit et al. (February 07, 2019) pointed out that providing a nutritive substance to offspring is not uncommon in the Arthropoda and argued that spider milk should be considere...
This chapter examines the effects of structural defense traits on feeding rates of mammalian browsers. The set of structural defenses deployed by a woody plant strongly depends upon the herbivore species being targeted by those defenses. The chapter deals with structural defenses against medium‐to‐large savanna ungulates. First, the chapter discuss...
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...
Lactation is a mammalian attribute, and the few known nonmammal examples have
distinctly different modalities. We document here milk provisioning in a jumping spider,
which compares functionally and behaviorally to lactation in mammals.The spiderlings ingest
nutritious milk droplets secreted from the mother’s epigastric furrow until the subadult
st...
Tropical savannas have a ground cover dominated by C4 grasses, with fire and herbivory constraining woody cover below a rainfall‐based potential. The savanna biome covers 50% of the African continent, encompassing diverse ecosystems that include densely wooded Miombo woodlands and Serengeti grasslands with scattered trees. African savannas provide...
Disease emergence events regularly result from human activities such as agriculture, which frequently brings large populations of genetically uniform hosts into contact with potential pathogens. Although viruses cause nearly 50% of emerging plant diseases, there is little systematic information about virus distribution across agro-ecological interf...
1.Where large browsers are abundant, the survival of trees depends upon their ability to deploy defences, either chemical or structural. Structural defences include the arrangement of dense and intricate architecture, termed ‘cage’ architecture. Previous studies showed that trees developing in herbivore-rich environments tend to have more cage arch...
Cambridge Core - Ecology and Conservation - Conserving Africa's Mega-Diversity in the Anthropocene - edited by Joris P. G. M. Cromsigt
Savanna and forest biomes co-occur across many subtropical landscapes in Africa, and can be differentiated by their fire regime: fires are more frequent in savannas compared to forest. Bark thickness is a key trait of savanna trees promoting their survival in this context. The rate of bark production (increment/year) should therefore be critical fo...
Globally, as trends of urbanisation continue to intensify, there has been increasing concern over the impacts of urban expansion on biodiversity and greater attention towards addressing these impacts. Ecological infrastructure such as urban rivers and their catchments may enhance biodiversity, ecological functioning and ecosystem service delivery w...
Savannas first began to spread across Africa during the Miocene. A major hypothesis for explaining this vegetation change is the increase in C4 grasses, promoting fire. We investigated whether mammals could also have contributed to savanna expansion by using spinescence as a marker of mammal herbivory. Looking at the present distribution of 1,852 t...
Tropical savannas are hypothesized to be hot spots of nitrogen fixer diversity and activity
because of the high disturbance and low nitrogen characteristic of savanna landscapes. Here we
compare the abundances of nitrogen-fixing and non-fixing trees in both tropical savannas and
tropical forests under climatically equivalent conditions, using plant...
Plant structural defences against mammals play an important role in ecosystem functioning as they simultaneously mediate the fitness of both animals and plants. The efficiency of structural defences can be described by the amount of plant material an animal can remove in one bite. Quantifying bite size by direct observation is difficult requiring c...
Tree densities in tropical and sub-tropical vegetation have, until recently, long been understood as increasing
proportionally in response to precipitation. Current understanding is that trees are organised into alternative
states with divergent properties that are linked, in the case of savannas, to frequent grass-fuelled fires or the
absence of f...
Contrasting fire regimes maintain patch mosaics of savanna, thicket and forest biomes in many African subtropical landscapes. Species dominating each biome are thus expected to display distinct fire-related traits, commonly thought to be bark related. Recent Australian savanna research suggests that bud position, not bark protection alone, determin...
Plant architecture is related to the performance of long-lived plants; its role in promoting species coexistence and in successional patterns is now widely recognized. However, because plant architecture involves branching processes, it is highly variable at the intra-specific level. In this paper, we address two questions: What is the best way to...
In the Neotropics, the genus Hydrangea of the popular ornamental hortensia family is represented by climbing species that strongly cling to their support surface by means of adhesive roots closely positioned along specialized anchoring stems. These root-climbing hortensia species belong to the nearly exclusive
American Hydrangea section Cornidia an...
While phenotypic plasticity is considered the major means that allows plant to cope with environmental heterogeneity, scant information is available on phenotypic plasticity of the whole-plant architecture in relation to ontogenic processes. We performed an architectural analysis to gain an understanding of the structural and ontogenic properties o...
L’étude qualitative et quantitative du mode de développement des plantes envahissantes est actuellement considérée comme une étape clef dans la compréhension des phénomènes d’invasion. L’objectif de ce travail est de préciser les relations qui existent entre la structure architecturale des buissons et leur caractère proliférant. Nous avons sélectio...
Qualitative and quantitative studies of the pattern of invasive plant development is considered a key aspect in understanding invasiveness. An architectural analysis was therefore performed in order to understand the relationship between shoot architecture and invasiveness in red-osier dogwood, Cornus sericea (Cornaceae).
The structural and ontogen...
Architectural descriptors were used to understand root system structure and development in white yam (Dioscorea rotundata
Poir., Dioscoreaceae), a tuber monocot. Observations were made on seedlings and plant derived from tuber fragments, cultivated
in greenhouses over a developmental cycle. This study demonstrated that both seedlings and plants der...
Questions
Question (1)
Hi, are you aware of any anatomical differences between woods of stem and root?
Projects
Projects (5)
Our project aims to understand how tropical landscapes composed of multiple biomes are responding to recent Climate Change-Land Use Change (CC-LUC) interactions. Focusing on the unique coastal savanna of Ghana (CSG), we will 1) explore changes that have already occurred and the trajectories of change across dry forest, thicket, savanna, and grasslands, and 2) identify the main CC-LUC mechanisms driving these trajectories.
Our project aim to generate dated chronogram of the family Combretaceae, infer the time of appearances of open habitat lineages across continents and analyse the functional responses in deep time to vegetation opening, herbivory and fire on the evolution of plant architecture.
Plant defence against large mammalian herbivores trade-off into ‘architectural’ and ‘low nutrient’ defence strategies. Architectural defence strategy encompasses the possession of spinescence (i.e. spines, thorns and prickles) and ‘cagey’ branching patterns that limit feeding rates. Low nutrient (cruddy) strategy includes traits such as leaf toughness, poor leaf nutrition and deployment of quantitative and qualitative secondary metabolites. In this project, we aim to explore the trait syndromes associated with each of these strategy and whether these underpins the divergent distribution of these strategies across resource gradients
