Abstract
Abstract Harsh conditions in arid and semi-arid environments make seedling establishment rare. Plant recruitment in arid environments often occurs only in years with above average rainfall or in safe sites under the canopy of nurse plants that provide shelter from high temperatures and low moisture. Associations of establishing seedlings with adult plants are referred to as nurse-protege interactions and are thought to be commensalisms in which seedlings benefit from the micro-environment created by adult plants with no effect for the latter. This phenomenon is thought to be more frequent in harsh than in mild environments and appears to occur frequently in deserts and arid and semi-arid biomes. Here, we investigate whether nurse-protege interactions are more common in arid environments by searching the published literature from the previous 92 years using the terms nurse plants, protege plants, facilitation, nucleation and facultative mutualism. We then quantitatively compared these reports from arid zon...
Published Version
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