Anthropogenic climate warming affects plant communities by changing community structure and function. Studies on climate warming have primarily focused on individual effects of warming, but the interactive effects of warming with biotic factors could be at least as important in community responses to climate change. In addition, climate change experiments spanning multiple years are necessary to capture interannual variability and detect the influence of these effects within ecological communities. Our study explores the individual and interactive effects of warming and insect herbivory on plant traits and community responses within a 7-year warming and herbivory manipulation experiment in two early successional plant communities in Michigan, USA. We find stronger support for the individual effects of both warming and herbivory on multiple plant morphological and phenological traits; only the timing of plant green-up and seed set demonstrated an interactive effect between warming and herbivory. With herbivory, warming advanced green-up, but with reduced herbivory, there was no significant effect of warming. In contrast, warming increased plant biomass, but the effect of warming on biomass did not depend upon the level of insect herbivores. We found that these treatments had stronger effects in some years than others, highlighting the need for multiyear experiments. This study demonstrates that warming and herbivory can have strong direct effects on plant communities, but that their interactive effects are limited in these early successional systems. Because the strength and direction of these effects can vary by ecological context, it is still advisable to include levels of biotic interactions, multiple traits and years, and community type when studying climate change effects on plants and their communities.

Empirical studies on peer review bias are primarily conducted by people from privileged groups and with affiliations with the journals studied. Data access is one major barrier to conducting peer review research. Accordingly, we propose pathways to broaden access to peer review data to people from more diverse backgrounds.

Premise:The selection of Arabidopsis as a model organism played a pivotal role in advancing genomic science. The competing frameworks to select an agricultural- or ecological-based model species were rejected, in favor of building knowledge in a species that would facilitate genome-enabled research. Methods:Here, we examine the ability of models based on Arabidopsis gene expression data to predict tissue identity in other flowering plants. Comparing different machine learning algorithms, models trained and tested on Arabidopsis data achieved near perfect precision and recall values, whereas when tissue identity is predicted across the flowering plants using models trained on Arabidopsis data, precision values range from 0.69 to 0.74 and recall from 0.54 to 0.64. Results:The identity of belowground tissue can be predicted more accurately than other tissue types, and the ability to predict tissue identity is not correlated with phylogenetic distance from Arabidopsis. k-nearest neighbors is the most successful algorithm, suggesting that gene expression signatures, rather than marker genes, are more valuable to create models for tissue and cell type prediction in plants. Discussion:Our data-driven results highlight that the assertion that knowledge from Arabidopsis is translatable to other plants is not always true. Considering the current landscape of abundant sequencing data, we should reevaluate the scientific emphasis on Arabidopsis and prioritize plant diversity.

Peer review is central to the scientific process and scientists' career advancement, but bias at various stages of the review process disadvantages some authors. Here we use peer review data from 312,740 biological sciences manuscripts across 31 studies to (1) examine evidence for differential peer review outcomes based on author demographics, (2) evaluate the efficacy of solutions to reduce bias and (3) describe the current landscape of peer review policies for 541 ecology and evolution journals. We found notably worse review outcomes (for example, lower overall acceptance rates) for authors whose institutional affiliations were in Asia, for authors whose country's primary language is not English and in countries with relatively low Human Development Indices. We found few data evaluating efficacy of interventions outside of reducing gender bias through double-blind review or diversifying reviewer/editorial boards. Despite evidence for review outcome gaps based on author demographics, few journals currently implement policies intended to mitigate bias (for example, 15.9% of journals practised double-blind review and 2.03% had reviewer guidelines that mentioned social justice issues). The lack of demographic equity signals an urgent need to better understand and implement evidence-based bias mitigation strategies.

Anthropogenic climate change is affecting virtually all ecosystems across the globe. Some of the noticeable effects of the changing climate are the shifting of frost dates in the fall and spring, and how warm temperatures are distributed throughout the year. The degree to which an ecosystem is affected by these changes depends upon many factors, including where the ecosystem is located and what regional variabilities in climate surround that ecosystem. One ecosystem that experiences a unique microclimate is the region surrounding Lake Erie, the southernmost Laurentian Great Lake. Using historic climate data dating from 1948 to 2017, we set out to determine how changes in temperature and frost dates differ between the coastal and inland regions of the southern coast of Lake Erie, and to hypothesize as to why these effects may be occurring differently between these regions. We found that, for both coastal and inland regions, the first frost in the fall has begun later, while the last frost in the spring has begun earlier, leading to both regions experiencing longer frost-free seasons. However, although both regions have experienced these shifts, the rate at which these shifts occurred differed between the coastal and inland regions. The average date that the frost events occurred also differs between the two regions. It was also found that average temperatures have been increasing for each region, primarily in coastal regions, due to increased minimum temperatures over time. The results from this study highlight the importance of regional climate variability in large-scale climatic studies.

The compound 1,4-dimethylnaphthalene, originally isolated from dormant potatoes, is currently in use as a commercial sprout inhibitor. Growers and processors report a reduction in fungal infections in potatoes treated with DMN resulting in increased yields. To assess the effects of DMN on fungal growth a culture of Fusarium oxysporum was isolated from potato tubers and identified via DNA fingerprinting using the 18ITS ribosomal region. Growth of F. oxysporum was inhibited by 31% after four days of exposure to DMN but overall rate of spore germination was not affected by DMN treatment. The growth of additional fungi, including Alternaria alternata, Aspergillus niger, Epicoccum nigrum, Gnomoniopsis smithogilvyi, Phoma medicaginis, and Pythium ultimum was inhibited by DMN as was suppression of sporulation in A. niger. These results suggest that DMN is fungistatic at the application levels examined.

The compound 1,4‐dimethylnaphthalene (DMN) was originally isolated from dormant potatoes and is currently being used as a commercial sprout inhibitor. In order to determine how the microbiome of potatoes is affected by the compound, two fungal species were grown and quantified under control and DMN conditions: Pythium ultimum and Aspergillus niger. These two fungal species are commonly found on the surface of potatoes and can result, respectively, in Pythium leak and black rot on onions. Fungal cultures were obtained from ATCC (P. ultimum: 58811, A. niger: 16888) and grown on potato dextrose agar (PDA). Mycelial cultures were grown in 9.5 Liter BBL GasPak chambers, exposed to either mineral oil (control) or DMN for two days. The mycelial mats exhibited reduced growth under DMN conditions in comparison to controls. DMN treatment of mature A. niger cultures also prevented sporulation. This indicates that DMN displays fungistatic properties but does not function as a fungicide towards P. ultimum and A. niger. In order to determine how DMN affects the gene expression of these fungi, RNA sequences will be collected and gene expression will be observed between control and DMN treatments.Support or Funding InformationSupported in part by a grant from the 1,4‐Group of Meridian, ID and the Behrend College Undergraduate Research FundThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.