For a plant to thrive, it needs the help of a friendly fungus—preferably one that will dig its way deep into the cells of the plant’s roots.

Plants live in symbiosis with root-associated, or mycorrhizal, fungi. The fungi provide up to 80 percent of the nutrients and water a plant needs to grow, and the plants produce up to 30 percent of the photosynthate—a food substance made through photosynthesis—that the fungi need.

The effects of climate change in the tropics are manifesting as changes in species abundances, shifts in ranges, and changes in the timing of life history events, like fruiting and flowering of trees, according to a literature review published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics and authored by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor.

Climate plays a major role in the distribution and abundance of species, and climate change will likely alter life in the tropics.

“One of the clearest signals of the impact of climate change in the tropics has been the upslope movement of a variety of species,” said Kimberly Sheldon, author of the review and assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “With warming, we would predict species would move toward higher elevations, and we see that tropical birds, moths, trees, and herpetofauna are all shifting upslope.”

A Guam Micronesian Kingfisher at the Bronx Zoo. Credit: Eric Savage.

A bird that has been declared extinct in the wild for more than 30 years could see a return to its natural habitat on the Pacific island of Guam, thanks to the work of a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researcher.

New research by a global team of scientists has resulted in significant strides in ornithological classification and identified possible causes of diversity among modern bird species.

The study, coauthored by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses on perching birds, or passerines. Comprised of over 6,000 species, this group—which constitutes over half of all known bird species—includes familiar birds such as robins, jays, bluebirds, finches, and sparrows.

The report also includes an analysis of the impact some events in Earth’s history could have had on passerines’ biodiversity.

Reef fish species at the extremes of the food chain—those that are strict herbivores or strict fish predators—evolve faster than fish species in the middle of the food chain with a more varied diet, according to a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The paper, co-authored by Samuel Borstein, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, could challenge the way scientists think about evolution in relation to the position a species holds on the food chain.

Up until now, scientists thought that species that eat a wide variety of different foods might evolve quicker and show more variations in morphology—physical aspects such as size, shape, and color.