Functional trait perspective on suitable habitat distribution of invasive plant species at a global scale

Abstract Plant invasion has been proved to threaten biodiversity conservation and ecosystem maintenance at a global scale. It is a challenge to project suitable habitat distributions of invasive plant species (IPS) for invasion risk assessment at large spatial scales. Interaction outcomes between native and invasive plant species are dependent as a function of trait context, which may contribute to suitable habitat distributions of IPS. Here, we explored the effect of functional trait context on suitable habitat distribution of invasive plant species at a global scale. The plant functional trait context was quantified based on the community mean values of specific leaf area, leaf nitrogen concentration, height, and woody density. Habitat suitability modeling was used to project suitable habitat distributions of IPS based on functional trait and abiotic (climate, soil, and human footprint) contexts. There were significant differences in contexts between functional traits and abiotic conditions for IPS across different biomes at a global scale. Community mean functional traits, particularly, height could contribute to habitat suitability of IPS. The functional trait context could have a large effect on the habitat suitability of IPS in Boreal forests/Taiga, Tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas and shrublands, Tundra, Mediterranean forests, woodlands and scrub, and Mangroves. Functional trait context could affect suitable habitat distributions of IPS at a global scale, indicating that functional trait context should be used as the input for modeling habitat suitability of IPS. The study provided new insights into the application of habitat suitability modeling on plant invasion risk assessment

Caching in Combination Networks: Novel Multicast Message Generation and Delivery by Leveraging the Network Topology

Maddah-Ali and Niesen's original coded caching scheme for shared-link broadcast networks is now known to be optimal to within a factor two, and has been applied to other types of networks. For practical reasons, this paper considers that a server communicates to cache-aided users through $H$ intermediate relays. In particular, it focuses on combination networks where each of the $K = \binom{H}{r}$ users is connected to a distinct $r$-subsets of relays. By leveraging the symmetric topology of the network, this paper proposes a novel method to general multicast messages and to deliver them to the users. By numerical evaluations, the proposed scheme is shown to reduce the download time compared to the schemes available in the literature. The idea is then extended to decentralized combination networks, more general relay networks, and combination networks with cache-aided relays and users. Also in these cases the proposed scheme outperforms known ones.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted in ICC 2018, correct the typo in (6) of the previous versio