The new issue 2018/5 of the Journal of Vegetation Science is out

The cover of the new JVS issue shows different fruits of woody plants from the island of Réunion, related to the paper by Albert, Flores, Rouget, Wilding, & Strasberg (2018). 

They used a set of vegetation plots from this tropical island to describe a pattern of striking decrease in the proportion of fleshy-fruited trees and shrubs with altitude. They explored this pattern in the context of phylogenetic community structure, which tends to be overdispersed in tropical lowlands and clustered in harsher high-altitude environments. Their explanation of why there are fewer fleshy-fruited species at high altitudes is based on the hypothesis of tropical niche conservatism, i.e. inability of the tropical fleshy-fruited lineages to adapt to high-altitude environments, combined with dispersal limitation on the oceanic island, which is difficult to reach for hardy plant species from the fleshy-fruited extratropical lineages.