Effective habitat restoration requires an understanding of species habitat preferences and the associated mechanisms driving those preferences. We examined the patterns and causes of oviposition preference in the monarch butterfly, a rapidly declining species, in southwestern Ontario at both landscape and milkweed patch spatial scales. Additionally, we measured the abundance of invertebrate predators, parasitoids and parasites across these same spatial scales.

Non-native plants invade some tropical forests but there are few long-term studies of these invasions, and the consequences for plant richness and diversity are unclear. Repeated measurements of permanent plots in tropical montane rain forests in the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park in Jamaica over 24 to 40 years coincided with invasion by a non-native tree, Pittosporum undulatum.

Constructing complete, accurate plant DNA barcode reference libraries can be logistically challenging for large-scale floras. Here we demonstrate the promise and challenges of using herbarium collections for building a DNA barcode reference library for the vascular plant flora of Canada.

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