Nonvascular photoautotrophs (NVP), including bryophytes, lichens, terrestrial algae, and cyanobacteria, are increasingly recognized as being essential to ecosystem functioning in many regions of the world. Current research suggests that climate change may pose a substantial threat to NVP, but the extent to which this will affect the associated ecosystem functions and services is highly uncertain. Here, we propose a research agenda to address this urgent question, focusing on physiological and ecological processes that link NVP to ecosystem functions while also taking into account the substantial taxonomic diversity across multiple ecosystem types.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEcosystems provide multiple services to humans. However, agricultural systems are usually evaluated on their productivity and economic performance, and a systematic and quantitative assessment of the multifunctionality of agroecosystems including environmental services is missing. Using a long-term farming system experiment, we evaluated and compared the agronomic, economic, and ecological performance of the most widespread arable cropping systems in Europe: organic, conservation, and conventional agriculture.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiversity of producers (e.g. plants) usually increases the diversity of associated organisms, but the scale (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs limited resources, soils are the largest terrestrial sinks of organic carbon. In this respect, 3D modelling of soil organic carbon (SOC) offers substantial improvements in the understanding and assessment of the spatial distribution of SOC stocks. Previous three-dimensional SOC modelling approaches usually averaged each depth increment for multi-layer two-dimensional predictions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoil properties and terrain attributes are of great interest to explain and model plant productivity and community assembly (hereafter P&CA). Many studies only sample surface soils, and may therefore miss important variation of deeper soil levels. We aimed to identify a critical soil depth in which the relationships between soil properties and P&CA were strongest due to an ideal interplay among soil properties and terrain attributes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research has extended its scope from communities that are short-lived or reshape their structure annually to structurally complex forest ecosystems. The establishment of tree diversity experiments poses specific methodological challenges for assessing the multiple functions provided by forest ecosystems. In particular, methodological inconsistencies and nonstandardized protocols impede the analysis of multifunctionality within, and comparability across the increasing number of tree diversity experiments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoil erosion is a key threat to many ecosystems, especially in subtropical China where high erosion rates occur. While the mechanisms that induce soil erosion on agricultural land are well understood, soil erosion processes in forests have rarely been studied. Throughfall kinetic energy (TKE) is influenced in manifold ways and often determined by the tree's leaf and architectural traits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF