Justin Prouty Wright

Journal article Plant Ecol. · March 2022 Featured Publication The effects of sea level rise and coastal saltwater intrusion on wetland plants can extend well above the high-tide line due to drought, hurricanes, and groundwater intrusion. Research has examined how coastal salt marsh plant communities respond to increa ... Full text Cite

Rapid deforestation of a coastal landscape driven by sea-level rise and extreme events.

Journal article Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · July 2021 Featured Publication Climate change is driving ecological shifts in coastal regions of the world, where low topographic relief makes ecosystems particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise, salinization, storm surge, and other effects of global climate change. The consequences of ... Full text Cite

Changes in Prescribed Fire Frequency Alter Ecosystem Carbon Dynamics

Journal article Ecosystems. · April 2021 Featured Publication Changes in fire frequency from historical norms are becoming more frequent due to both changes in management and climate change factors. There is uncertainty about whether increasing fire frequency will lead to decreased carbon pools due to shorter inter-f ... Full text Cite

Intraspecific trait variability shapes leaf trait response to altered fire regimes.

Journal article Annals of botany · March 2021 Featured Publication Background and aimsUnderstanding impacts of altered disturbance regimes on community structure and function is a key goal for community ecology. Functional traits link species composition to ecosystem functioning. Changes in the distribution of fu ... Full text Cite

Rare microbial taxa emerge when communities collide: freshwater and marine microbiome responses to experimental mixing.

Journal article Ecology · March 2020 Featured Publication Whole microbial communities regularly merge with one another, often in tandem with their environments, in a process called community coalescence. Such events impose substantial changes: abiotic perturbation from environmental blending and biotic perturbati ... Full text Cite

Succession, regression and loss: does evidence of saltwater exposure explain recent changes in the tree communities of North Carolina's Coastal Plain?

Journal article Annals of botany · February 2020 Featured Publication Background and aimsCoastal plant communities globally are highly vulnerable to future sea-level rise and storm damage, but the extent to which these habitats are affected by the various environmental perturbations associated with chronic salinizat ... Full text Cite

Nitrogen uptake and biomass resprouting show contrasting relationships with resource acquisitive and conservative plant traits

Journal article Journal of Vegetation Science. · January 2019 Featured Publication QUESTIONS: Disturbances can cause fluctuations in resource availability that influence plant performance. In systems with such dynamics, inter‐specific differences in resource capture may promote co‐existence by partitioning competition between periods of ... Full text Cite

Warming reverses top-down effects of predators on belowground ecosystem function in Arctic tundra.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2018 Featured Publication Predators can disproportionately impact the structure and function of ecosystems relative to their biomass. These effects may be exacerbated under warming in ecosystems like the Arctic, where the number and diversity of predators are low and small shifts i ... Full text Cite

Temperature accelerates the rate fields become forests.

Journal article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · May 2018 Featured Publication Secondary succession, the postdisturbance transition of herbaceous to woody-dominated ecosystems, occurs faster at lower latitudes with important ramifications for ecosystem processes. This pattern could be driven by the direct effect of temperature on tre ... Full text Cite

Functional traits of the understory plant community of a pyrogenic longleaf pine forest across environmental gradients.

Journal article Ecology · August 2017 Featured Publication Understanding and predicting the response of plant communities to environmental changes and disturbances such as fire requires an understanding of the functional traits present in the system, including within and across species variability, and their dynam ... Full text Cite

Intraspecific variability improves environmental matching, but does not increase ecological breadth along a wet-to-dry ecotone

Journal article Oikos · July 1, 2017 Featured Publication It is widely assumed that higher levels of intraspecific variability in one or more traits should allow species to persist under a wider range of environmental conditions. However, few studies have examined whether species that exhibit high variability are ... Full text Cite

Invasive species' leaf traits and dissimilarity from natives shape their impact on nitrogen cycling: a meta-analysis.

Journal article The New phytologist · January 2017 Featured Publication Many exotic species have little apparent impact on ecosystem processes, whereas others have dramatic consequences for human and ecosystem health. There is growing evidence that invasions foster eutrophication. We need to identify species that are harmful a ... Full text Cite

Multiple environmental drivers structure plant traits at the community level in a pyrogenic ecosystem

Journal article Functional Ecology · May 1, 2016 Featured Publication Trait-based approaches offer a way to predict changes in community structure along environmental gradients using measurable properties of individuals. Promoted as being generalizable across systems, trait-based approaches benefit from information about the ... Full text Cite

The more things change, the more they stay the same? When is trait variability important for stability of ecosystem function in a changing environment.

Journal article Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · May 2016 Featured Publication The importance of intraspecific trait variability for community dynamics and ecosystem functioning has been underappreciated. There are theoretical reasons for predicting that species that differ in intraspecific trait variability will also differ in their ... Full text Cite