Bridging the gap: how to adopt opportunistic plant observations for phenology monitoring.

Plant phenology plays a vital role in assessing climate change. To monitor this, individual plants are traditionally visited and observed by trained volunteers organized in national or international networks - in Germany, for example, by the German Weather Service, DWD. However, their number of observers is continuously decreasing.

The three major axes of terrestrial ecosystem function.

The leaf economics spectrum and the global spectrum of plant forms and functions revealed fundamental axes of variation in plant traits, which represent different ecological strategies that are shaped by the evolutionary development of plant species. Ecosystem functions depend on environmental conditions and the traits of species that comprise the ecological communities. However, the axes of variation of ecosystem functions are largely unknown, which limits our understanding of how ecosystems respond as a whole to anthropogenic drivers, climate and environmental variability.

The role of climate, foliar stoichiometry and plant diversity on ecosystem carbon balance.

Global change is affecting terrestrial carbon (C) balances. The effect of climate on ecosystem C balance has been largely explored, but the roles of other concurrently changing factors, such as diversity and nutrient availability, remain elusive. We used eddy-covariance C-flux measurements from 62 ecosystems from which we compiled information on climate, ecosystem type, stand age, species abundance and foliar concentrations of N and P of the main species, to assess their importance in the ecosystem C balance.

Publisher Correction: Stand age and species richness dampen interannual variation of ecosystem-level photosynthetic capacity.

In the version of this Article originally published, the wrong Supplementary Information pdf was uploaded, in which the figures did not correspond with those mentioned in the main text and the R code was not presented properly. This has now been replaced.

Stand age and species richness dampen interannual variation of ecosystem-level photosynthetic capacity.

The total uptake of carbon dioxide by ecosystems via photosynthesis (gross primary productivity, GPP) is the largest flux in the global carbon cycle. A key ecosystem functional property determining GPP is the photosynthetic capacity at light saturation (GPP), and its interannual variability (IAV) is propagated to the net land-atmosphere exchange of CO. Given the importance of understanding the IAV in CO fluxes for improving the predictability of the global carbon cycle, we have tested a range of alternative hypotheses to identify potential drivers of the magnitude of IAV in GPP in forest ecosystems.