Cessation of grazing causes biodiversity loss and homogenization of soil food webs.

There is widespread concern that cessation of grazing in historically grazed ecosystems is causing biotic homogenization and biodiversity loss. We used 12 montane grassland sites along an 800 km north-south gradient across the UK, to test whether cessation of grazing affects local - and -diversity of below-ground food webs. We show cessation of grazing leads to strongly decreased -diversity of most groups of soil microbes and fauna, particularly of relatively rare taxa.

Topoclimate effect on treeline elevation depends on the regional framework: A contrast between Southern Alps (New Zealand) and Apennines (Italy) forests.

Deciphering the spatial patterns of alpine treelines is critical for understanding the ecosystem processes involved in the persistence of tree species and their altitudinal limit. Treelines are thought to be controlled by temperature, and other environmental variables but they have rarely been investigated in regions with different land-use change legacies. Here, we systematically investigated treeline elevation in the Apennines (Italy) and Southern Alps (New Zealand) with contrasting human history but similar biogeographic trajectories, intending to identify distinct drivers that affect their current elevation and highlight their respective peculiarities.

Leading trait dimensions in flood-tolerant plants.

Background And Aims: While trait-based approaches have provided critical insights into general plant functioning, we lack a comprehensive quantitative view on plant strategies in flooded conditions. Plants adapted to flooded conditions have specific traits (e.g.

Environmental DNA metabarcoding reveals comparable responses to agricultural stressors on different trophic levels of a freshwater community.

Freshwater habitats are under stress from agricultural land use, most notably the influx of neonicotinoid pesticides and increased nutrient pressure from fertilizer. Traditional studies investigating the effects of stressors on freshwater systems are often limited to a narrow range of taxa, depending heavily on morphological expertise. Additionally, disentanglement of multiple simultaneous stressors can be difficult in field studies, whereas controlled laboratory conditions do not accurately reflect natural conditions and food webs.

Global analysis of trait-trait relationships within and between species.

Some commonly reported trait-trait relationships between species, including the leaf economic spectrum (LES), are regarded as important plant strategies but whether these relationships represent plant strategies in reality remains unclear. We propose a novel approach to distinguish trait-trait relationships between species that may represent plant strategies vs those relationships that are the result of common drivers, by comparing the direction and strength of intraspecific trait variation (ITV) vs interspecific trait variation. We applied this framework using a unique global ITV database that we compiled, which included 11 traits related to LES, size and roots, and observations from 2064 species occurring in 1068 communities across 19 countries.

Importance of natural land cover for plant species' conservation: A nationwide study in The Netherlands.

While shifts to high-intensity land cover have caused overwhelming biodiversity loss, it remains unclear how important natural land cover is to the occurrence, and thus the conservation, of different species groups. We used over 4 million plant species' observations to evaluate the conservation importance of natural land cover by its association with the occurrence probability of 1 122 native and 403 exotic plant species at 1 km resolution by species distribution models. We found that 74.

Global patterns of the leaf economics spectrum in wetlands.

The leaf economics spectrum (LES) describes consistent correlations among a variety of leaf traits that reflect a gradient from conservative to acquisitive plant strategies. So far, whether the LES holds in wetland plants at a global scale has been unclear. Using data on 365 wetland species from 151 studies, we find that wetland plants in general show a shift within trait space along the same common slope as observed in non-wetland plants, with lower leaf mass per area, higher leaf nitrogen and phosphorus, faster photosynthetic rates, and shorter leaf life span compared to non-wetland plants.

Variability in fish bioconcentration factors: Influences of study design and consequences for regulation.

The fish bioconcentration factor (BCF) is an important aspect within bioaccumulation assessments. Several factors have been suggested to influence BCF values - including species, developmental stage, mixture exposure, and calculation method. However, their exact contribution to variance in BCF values is unknown.

Variation of water use efficiency across seasons and years: Different role of herbaceous plants in desert ecosystem.

Desert ecosystems often structured in two distinct layers of woody and herbaceous plants. Changes in community composition alter the fractional coverage by bare soil, woody and herbaceous plants, with potential effects on water and carbon fluxes. We used eddy covariance measurements and chamber method in two similar shrub-dominated desert communities (Tamarix community and Haloxylon community) to assess inter- and intra-annual variations of ecosystem water use efficiency (EWUE) (where we distinguished whole ecosystem EWUE as EWUE, and EWUE of shrub and herbaceous layers as EWUE and EWUE) in central Asia.

Elevation alters ecosystem properties across temperate treelines globally.

Temperature is a primary driver of the distribution of biodiversity as well as of ecosystem boundaries. Declining temperature with increasing elevation in montane systems has long been recognized as a major factor shaping plant community biodiversity, metabolic processes, and ecosystem dynamics. Elevational gradients, as thermoclines, also enable prediction of long-term ecological responses to climate warming.

Effects of irrigation and addition of nitrogen fertiliser on net ecosystem carbon balance for a grassland.

The ability to quantify the impacts of changing management practices on the components of net ecosystem carbon balance (N) is required to forecast future changes in soil carbon stocks and potential feedbacks on atmospheric CO concentrations. In this study we investigated seasonal changes on the components of net ecosystem carbon balance resulting from the application of irrigation and nitrogen fertiliser to a temperate grassland in New Zealand where we simulated grazing events. We made seasonal measurements of the components of N using chamber measurements in field plots with and without irrigation and addition of nitrogen fertiliser.