Early-successional plant species invest in rapid growth and reproduction in contrast to slow growing late-successional species. We test the consistency of trade-offs between plant life history and ...responsiveness on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. We selected four very early-, seven early-, 11 middle-, and eight late-successional plant species from six different families and functional groups and grew them with and without a mixed fungal inoculum and compared root architecture, mycorrhizal responsiveness, and plant growth rate. Our results indicate mycorrhizal responsiveness increases with plant successional stage and that this effect explains more variation in mycorrhizal response than is explained by phylogenetic relatedness. The mycorrhizal responsiveness of individual plant species was positively correlated with mycorrhizal root infection and negatively correlated with average plant mass and the number of root tips per unit mass, indicating that both plant growth rate and root architecture trade off with investment in mycorrhizal mutualisms. Because late-successional plants are very responsive to mycorrhizal fungi, our results suggest that fungal community dynamics may be an important driver of plant succession.
Understanding tropical forest succession is critical for the development of tropical forest conservation strategies worldwide, given that tropical secondary forests can be considered the forests of ...the future. Tropical dry forests (TDF) are among the most threatened tropical ecosystems, there are more secondary forests and forest restoration efforts that require a better understanding of successional processes. The main goal of this synthesis for this special issue on the ecology and management of tropical dry forests in the Americas is to present a summarized review of the current knowledge of the ecology and management implications associated to TDF succession. We explore specific issues associated to tropical dry forest succession with emphasis on the use of chronosequences, plant diversity and composition, plant phenology and remote sensing, pollination, and animal–plant interactions; all under the integrating umbrella of ecosystem succession. We also emphasize the need to conduct socio-ecological research to understand changes in land-use history and its effects on succession and forest regeneration of TDF. We close this paper with some thoughts and ideas associated with the strong need for an integrating dimension not considered until today: the role of cyberinfrastructure and eco-informatics as a tool to support sound conservation, management and understanding of TDF in the Americas.
The family business succession planning literature routinely assumes two main motives on the part of incumbents: family business continuity across generations and family harmony. The cross–tabulation ...of these motives produces a typology consisting of four distinct combinations of motives for succession planning. In turn, these combinations suggest four outcomes of succession planning, framed as institutionalization, implosion, imposition, and individualization. The first two outcomes—institutionalization and implosion—are fully elucidated in the literature. The other two—imposition and individualization—are routinely overlooked. The proposed typology highlights the repertoire of motives that inform succession planning, and how they promote distinct succession outcomes.
Succession planning is a critical aspect of long-term strategy for RIAs, yet it is often met with resistance or procrastination. Depending on the source, it's believed that only approximately 30 ...percent to 40 percent of RIAs have instituted a succession plan. Understanding the key barriers to succession planning and implementing strategies to overcome them is essential for the continuity and prosperity of RIA firms and their stakeholders. Here, Chen explores six common hurdles faced by RIA firm owners in planning for succession and provides insights on how to navigate these challenges.
Research summary: Building on a unique data set with information on the nuclear structure of entrepreneurial families, we integrate leadership succession into a socioe-motional wealth (SEW) logic to ...test the antecedents and consequences of primogeniture vis-à-vis second- or subsequent-bom selection in family firm succession. Our findings suggest that appointing a family firstborn sibling is more likely when there is a high degree of SEW endowment and the family firm has pre-succession performance below aspiration levels. Next, we find that appointing a second- or subsequent-born sibling has a positive and significant effect on post-succession firm profitability, particularly when the firm is in its second generation or later. Managerial summary: What drives succession choices in family firms? What are the performance implications of each succession choice? These are questions of vital relevance for every business owner. Focusing on the pool of potential family heirs at the time of succession, our study adds to the debate on the drivers of succession choices by suggesting that having a family intensive governance structure fosters primogeniture as the main succession logic, even when the family firm is experiencing lower profitability. Our study informs business owners on the implications of different succession policies, suggesting that family firms that have the courage to disregard primogeniture and choose more wisely the family successor are also the ones experiencing higher post-succession performance.
Abstract The author, who is both a Chief Executive Officer/CEO and an attorney, writes about disaster planning and succession planning to “achieve the goals and aspirations for your organization ...without stumbling along the way or falling victim to a complete collapse when disasters and difficulties strike and impact your operations or personnel.” This means dealing effectively with uncertainty and change, critical/strategic decision categories, and “Committing to a regularized process for examining how to manage uncertainty and potential changes.” He presents results from surveys he has conducted with a variety of leaders, each with the results to questions about the following, in his words 1. Do You Have Processes in Place for Assessing, Deciding on, Planning, and Implementing Change? 2. What Has Been Your Most Difficult Organizational Phase? 3. What will be your most challenging future issues? 4. How do you plan for managing disasters? He discusses his process/framework of assessing, deciding, planning, and implementing. Each of these has its own figure, visualizing the steps involved. As he notes in the conclusion, “The COVID‐19 pandemic probably taught you that you cannot predict everything you and your organization will face.”
Once in the ocean, plastics are rapidly colonized by complex microbial communities. Factors affecting the development and composition of these communities are still poorly understood. Additionally, ...whether there are plastic-type specific communities developing on different plastics remains enigmatic. We determined the development and succession of bacterial communities on different plastics under ambient and dim light conditions in the coastal Northern Adriatic over the course of two months using scanning electron microscopy and 16S rRNA gene analyses. Plastics used were low- and high-density polyethylene (LDPE and HDPE, respectively), polypropylene (PP) and polyvinyl chloride with two typical additives (PVC DEHP and PVC DINP). The bacterial communities developing on the plastics clustered in two groups; one group was found on PVC and the other group on all the other plastics and on glass, which was used as an inert control. Specific bacterial taxa were found on specific surfaces in essentially all stages of biofilm development and in both ambient and dim light conditions. Differences in bacterial community composition between the different plastics and light exposures were stronger after an incubation period of one week than at the later stages of the incubation. Under both ambient and dim light conditions, one part of the bacterial community was common on all plastic types, especially in later stages of the biofilm development, with families such as Flavobacteriaceae, Rhodobacteraceae, Planctomycetaceae and Phyllobacteriaceae presenting relatively high relative abundances on all surfaces. Another part of the bacterial community was plastic-type specific. The plastic-type specific fraction was variable among the different plastic types and was more abundant after one week of incubation than at later stages of the succession.
Significance Although forest succession has been approached as a predictable process, successional trajectories vary widely, even among nearby stands with similar environmental conditions and ...disturbance histories. We quantified predictability and uncertainty during tropical forest succession using dynamical models describing the interactions among stem density, basal area, and species density over time. We showed that the trajectories of these forest attributes were poorly predicted by stand age and varied significantly within and among sites. Our models reproduced the general successional trends observed, but high levels of noise were needed to increase model predictability. These levels of uncertainty call into question the premise that successional processes are consistent over space and time, and challenge the way ecologists view tropical forest regeneration.
Although forest succession has traditionally been approached as a deterministic process, successional trajectories of vegetation change vary widely, even among nearby stands with similar environmental conditions and disturbance histories. Here, we provide the first attempt, to our knowledge, to quantify predictability and uncertainty during succession based on the most extensive long-term datasets ever assembled for Neotropical forests. We develop a novel approach that integrates deterministic and stochastic components into different candidate models describing the dynamical interactions among three widely used and interrelated forest attributesâstem density, basal area, and species density. Within each of the seven study sites, successional trajectories were highly idiosyncratic, even when controlling for prior land use, environment, and initial conditions in these attributes. Plot factors were far more important than stand age in explaining successional trajectories. For each site, the best-fit model was able to capture the complete set of time series in certain attributes only when both the deterministic and stochastic components were set to similar magnitudes. Surprisingly, predictability of stem density, basal area, and species density did not show consistent trends across attributes, study sites, or land use history, and was independent of plot size and time series length. The model developed here represents the best approach, to date, for characterizing autogenic successional dynamics and demonstrates the low predictability of successional trajectories. These high levels of uncertainty suggest that the impacts of allogenic factors on rates of change during tropical forest succession are far more pervasive than previously thought, challenging the way ecologists view and investigate forest regeneration.
In A Commentary on Selected Speeches of Isaios, Brenda Griffith-Williams offers a fresh insight, accessible to non-Greek readers, into four disputed inheritance cases from the Athenian courts in the ...4th century B.C.
In the resurgence of interest in inheritance flows following the publication of Piketty’s work, little attention has been paid to the affective practices that ensure the success of inheritance ...processes as wealth moves down generations of dynastic families. This article explores these practices, drawing on research among wealth managers, philanthropy advisors, family offices and their clients, to show how philanthropy is promoted by advisors to the wealthy as a tool to support inheritance and family business succession planning. In this process, advisors draw on the philanthropic imagination to style wealthy families as custodians of both private capital and the common good, thus mirroring the narratives used by philanthrocapitalists to legitimise their wealth in the public sphere. Here, however, the discourse of philanthrocapitalism is turned inwards to the private realm of the family, to persuade younger generations to rally around the collective project of the custodianship of wealth. By bringing together research on philanthropy and inheritance, this article contributes to the growing sociological literature on elites and the global inequalities driven by their accumulation of wealth. It shows how wealth accumulation is increasingly dependent not only on the mechanics of financial markets and inheritance flows, but also on affective wealth management strategies framed around ethical notions of kinship and social responsibility.
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