ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Soilborne fungi have host affinity and host-specific effects on seed germination and survival in a lowland tropical forest.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Soil microbial effects on tree seedling performance during forest secondary succession.Ecology · 2026Article
- Getting by With a Little Help From Fungal Friends: Seed-Associated Endophytes Contribute to Seed Defense Against Fungal Pathogens in Keystone Tropical Trees.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Foliar fungal symbionts in sympatric yellow monkeyflowers along elevation gradients in the Sierra Nevada.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Soil microbial communities in dry and moist tropical forests exhibit distinct shifts in community composition but not diversity with succession.Microbiology spectrum · 2025Article
- A curated soil fungal dataset to advance fungal ecology and conservation research in Australia and Antarctica.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Fungal community and taxa specialization to host and environment interactions in two temperate forests.PloS one · 2025Article
- Invasive Buffelgrass, Cenchrus ciliaris, Balances Opportunistic Acquisition of Foliar fungi With Host and Environmental Filtering in Its Introduced Range.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Juvenile Plant-Microbe Interactions Modulate the Adaptation and Response of Forest Seedlings to Rapid Climate Change.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Article
- Modelling how negative plant-soil feedbacks across life stages affect the spatial patterning of trees.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Antifungal Activity and Effect of Plant-Associated Bacteria on Phenolic Synthesis ofPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Communities of endophytic fungi in a Puerto Rican rainforest vary along a gradient of disturbance due to Hurricane Maria.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Microbial diversity declines in warmed tropical soil and respiration rise exceed predictions as communities adapt.Nature microbiology · 2022Article
- Traits along the leaf economics spectrum are associated with communities of foliar endophytic symbionts.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Metapopulations with habitat modification.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Drivers and implications of distance decay differ for ectomycorrhizal and foliar endophytic fungi across an anciently fragmented landscape.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Methodological Approaches Frame Insights into Endophyte Richness and Community Composition.Microbial ecology · 2021Article
- Fungi and insects compensate for lost vertebrate seed predation in an experimentally defaunated tropical forest.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Climate and seasonality drive the richness and composition of tropical fungal endophytes at a landscape scale.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Host plant environmental filtering drives foliar fungal community assembly in symptomatic leaves.Oecologia · 2021Article
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7 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The Janzen-Connell (JC) hypothesis provides a conceptual framework for explaining the maintenance of tree diversity in tropical forests. Its central tenet-that recruits experience high mortality near conspecifics and at high densities-assumes a degree of host specialization in interactions between plants and natural enemies. Studies confirming JC effects have focused primarily on spatial distributions of seedlings and saplings, leaving major knowledge gaps regarding the fate of seeds in soil and the specificity of the soilborne fungi that are their most important antagonists. Here we use a common garden experiment in a lowland tropical forest in Panama to show that communities of seed-infecting fungi are structured predominantly by plant species, with only minor influences of factors such as local soil type, forest characteristics, or time in soil (1-12 months). Inoculation experiments confirmed that fungi affected seed viability and germination in a host-specific manner and that effects on seed viability preceded seedling emergence. Seeds are critical components of reproduction for tropical trees, and the factors influencing their persistence, survival, and germination shape the populations of seedlings and saplings on which current perspectives regarding forest dynamics are based. Together these findings bring seed dynamics to light in the context of the JC hypothesis, implicating them directly in the processes that have emerged as critical for diversity maintenance in species-rich tropical forests.
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