Past Fire and Vegetation Change in the Hyperdiverse Forests of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The Ecuadorian Amazon holds more biodiversity than most other places on Earth. Palms are a particularly dominant component of the vegetation; however, it remains unknown to what degree the pattern has persisted through time. Here, we investigate the persistence of palm dominance through time and the degree to which past human activities (e.g., fire, cultivation, and forest opening) have affected changes in palm abundances across five regions of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We analyzed soil cores (40-80 cm depth) from each region for charcoal (evidence of past fire) and phytoliths (evidence of past vegetation change). The timings of fires (based on 14C radiocarbon dates), the occurrence, recurrence, and number of fires (based on charcoal presence and abundance in samples), and the amount of change in palm abundances (based on phytoliths) varied within and between the studied regions. The charcoal and phytolith results indicate the presence of low levels of past human activity at all sites. Our results show that patterns of modern palm hyperdominance found in Amazonian forests have not been persistent through time, and that even low levels of past human activities can affect palm abundance.

Leaf wax n-alkane patterns of six tropical montane tree species show species-specific environmental response.

It remains poorly understood how the composition of leaf wax n-alkanes reflects the local environment. This knowledge gap inhibits the interpretation of plant responses to the environment at the community level and, by extension, inhibits the applicability of n-alkane patterns as a proxy for past environments. Here, we studied the n-alkane patterns of five Miconia species and one Guarea species, in the Ecuadorian Andes (653-3,507 m a.s.l.). We tested for species-specific responses in the average chain length (ACL), the C31/(C31 + C29) ratio (ratio), and individual odd n-alkane chain lengths across an altitudinally driven environmental gradient (mean annual temperature, mean annual relative air humidity, and mean annual precipitation). We found significant correlations between the environmental gradients and species-specific ACL and ratio, but with varying magnitude and direction. We found that the n-alkane patterns are species-specific at the individual chain length level, which could explain the high variance in metrics like ACL and ratio. Although we find species-specific sensitivity and responses in leaf n-alkanes, we also find a general decrease in "shorter" (C31) chain lengths with the environmental gradients, most strongly with temperature, suggesting n-alkanes are useful for reconstructing past environments.

An integrated assessment of the vascular plant species of the Americas.

The cataloging of the vascular plants of the Americas has a centuries-long history, but it is only in recent decades that an overview of the entire flora has become possible. We present an integrated assessment of all known native species of vascular plants in the Americas. Twelve regional and national checklists, prepared over the past 25 years and including two large ongoing flora projects, were merged into a single list. Our publicly searchable checklist includes 124,993 species, 6227 genera, and 355 families, which correspond to 33% of the 383,671 vascular plant species known worldwide. In the past 25 years, the rate at which new species descriptions are added has averaged 744 annually for the Americas, and we can expect the total to reach about 150,000.

Availability, diversification and versatility explain human selection of introduced plants in Ecuadorian traditional medicine.

Globally, a majority of people use plants as a primary source of healthcare and introduced plants are increasingly discussed as medicine. Protecting this resource for human health depends upon understanding which plants are used and how use patterns will change over time. The increasing use of introduced plants in local pharmacopoeia has been explained by their greater abundance or accessibility (availability hypothesis), their ability to cure medical conditions that are not treated by native plants (diversification hypothesis), or as a result of the introduced plants' having many different simultaneous roles (versatility hypothesis). In order to describe the role of introduced plants in Ecuador, and to test these three hypotheses, we asked if introduced plants are over-represented in the Ecuadorian pharmacopoeia, and if their use as medicine is best explained by the introduced plants' greater availability, different therapeutic applications, or greater number of use categories. Drawing on 44,585 plant-use entries, and the checklist of >17,000 species found in Ecuador, we used multi-model inference to test if more introduced plants are used as medicines in Ecuador than expected by chance, and examine the support for each of the three hypotheses above. We find nuanced support for all hypotheses. More introduced plants are utilized than would be expected by chance, which can be explained by geographic distribution, their strong association with cultivation, diversification (except with regard to introduced diseases), and therapeutic versatility, but not versatility of use categories. Introduced plants make a disproportionately high contribution to plant medicine in Ecuador. The strong association of cultivation with introduced medicinal plant use highlights the importance of the maintenance of human-mediated environments such as homegardens and agroforests for the provisioning of healthcare services.