The role of protected areas co-management in enhancing resistance and resilience of deciduous forest ecosystem to extreme climatic events in Bangladesh.

Due to ongoing and projected climate change as well as increasing anthropogenic disturbances, the tropical deciduous forest has been experiencing a decline in its biomass and productivity. To mitigate this adverse effect, many tropical countries have adopted forest co-management engaging local communities. However, the effects of co-management on the resistance and resilience of forest ecosystems to extreme climatic events have rarely been tested.

Global patterns of vascular plant alpha diversity.

Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (local species richness) for vascular plants at three different spatial grains, for forests and non-forests. We show that alpha diversity is consistently high across grains in some regions (for example, Andean-Amazonian foothills), but regional 'scaling anomalies' (deviations from the positive correlation) exist elsewhere, particularly in Eurasian temperate forests with disproportionally higher fine-grained richness and many African tropical forests with disproportionally higher coarse-grained richness.

Invader presence disrupts the stabilizing effect of species richness in plant community recovery after drought.

Higher biodiversity can stabilize the productivity and functioning of grassland communities when subjected to extreme climatic events. The positive biodiversity-stability relationship emerges via increased resistance and/or recovery to these events. However, invader presence might disrupt this diversity-stability relationship by altering biotic interactions.

Winter warming is ecologically more relevant than summer warming in a cool-temperate grassland.

Climate change affects all seasons, but warming is more pronounced in winter than summer at mid- and high latitudes. Winter warming can have profound ecological effects, which are rarely compared to the effects of summer warming, and causal explanations are not well established. We compared mild aboveground infrared warming in winter to warming in summer in a semi-natural, cool-temperate grassland in Germany for four years.