Nineteenth-century land use shapes the current occurrence of some plant species, but weakly affects the richness and total composition of Central European grasslands.

Context: Historical land use is thought to have influenced plant community diversity, composition and function through the local persistence of taxa that reflect ecological conditions of the past.

Objectives: We tested for the effects of historical land use on contemporary plant species richness, composition, and ecological preferences in the grassland vegetation of Central Europe.

Methods: We analyzed 6975 vegetation plots sampled between 1946 and 2021 in dry, mesic, and wet grasslands in the borderland between Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

LCA analysis for assessing environmenstal sustainability of new biobased chemicals by valorising citrus waste.

The global shift towards using biomass for biofuels and chemicals is accelerating due to increasing environmental concerns and geopolitical strategies. This study investigates a biorefinery model using citrus-processing-waste, specifically citrus pulp, to produce high-value products for various industries, including cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, flavours, fragrances, and food packaging. In Italy, particularly Sicily region, citrus processing generates significant amounts of waste, often improperly disposed of, contributing to environmental problems.

Environmental drivers of increased ecosystem respiration in a warming tundra.

Arctic and alpine tundra ecosystems are large reservoirs of organic carbon. Climate warming may stimulate ecosystem respiration and release carbon into the atmosphere. The magnitude and persistency of this stimulation and the environmental mechanisms that drive its variation remain uncertain.

Climate-trait relationships exhibit strong habitat specificity in plant communities across Europe.

Ecological theory predicts close relationships between macroclimate and functional traits. Yet, global climatic gradients correlate only weakly with the trait composition of local plant communities, suggesting that important factors have been ignored. Here, we investigate the consistency of climate-trait relationships for plant communities in European habitats.

A Matter of Metals: Copper but Not Cadmium Affects the Microbial Alpha-Diversity of Soils and Sediments - a Meta-analysis.

Heavy metal (HM) accumulation in soil affects plants and soil fauna, yet the effect on microbial alpha-diversity remains unclear, mainly due to the absence of dedicated research synthesis (e.g. meta-analysis).

Topography of the Dolomites modulates range dynamics of narrow endemic plants under climate change.

Climate change is expected to threaten endemic plants in the Alps. In this context, the factors that may modulate species responses are rarely investigated at a local scale. We analyzed eight alpine narrow endemics of the Dolomites (southeastern Alps) under different predicted climate change scenarios at fine spatial resolutions.

Land use and water availability drive community-level plant functional diversity of grasslands along a temperature gradient in the Swiss Alps.

Functional traits of mountain grassland communities strongly depend upon temperature variation along elevational gradients. However, little is known to what degree the direction of such trait-temperature relationships is shaped by other environmental factors or land-use types. Here, we investigated context-dependent patterns of plant functional trait variation in alpine grassland communities.

Global patterns of intraspecific leaf trait responses to elevation.

Elevational gradients are often used to quantify how traits of plant species respond to abiotic and biotic environmental variations. Yet, such analyses are frequently restricted spatially and applied along single slopes or mountain ranges. Since we know little on the response of intraspecific leaf traits to elevation across the globe, we here perform a global meta-analysis of leaf traits in 109 plant species located in 4 continents and reported in 71 studies published between 1983 and 2018.

Understanding context dependency in the response of forest understorey plant communities to nitrogen deposition.

Understorey communities can dominate forest plant diversity and strongly affect forest ecosystem structure and function. Understoreys often respond sensitively but inconsistently to drivers of ecological change, including nitrogen (N) deposition. Nitrogen deposition effects, reflected in the concept of critical loads, vary greatly not only among species and guilds, but also among forest types.

Global environmental change effects on plant community composition trajectories depend upon management legacies.

The contemporary state of functional traits and species richness in plant communities depends on legacy effects of past disturbances. Whether temporal responses of community properties to current environmental changes are altered by such legacies is, however, unknown. We expect global environmental changes to interact with land-use legacies given different community trajectories initiated by prior management, and subsequent responses to altered resources and conditions.