Insect herbivory facilitates the establishment of an invasive plant pathogen.

Plants can be severely affected by insect herbivores and phytopathogenic fungi, but interactions between these plant antagonists are poorly understood. We analysed the impact of feeding damage by the abundant herbivore Orchestes fagi on infection rates of beech (Fagus sylvatica) leaves with Petrakia liobae, an invasive plant pathogenic fungus. The fungus was not detected in hibernating beetles, indicating that O.

Bark coverage shifts assembly processes of microbial decomposer communities in dead wood.

Bark protects living trees against environmental influences but may promote wood decomposition by fungi and bacteria after tree death. However, the mechanisms by which bark determines the assembly process and biodiversity of decomposers remain unknown. Therefore, we partially or completely removed bark from experimentally felled trees and tested with null modelling whether assembly processes were determined by bark coverage and if biodiversity of molecularly sampled fungi and bacteria generally benefited from increasing bark cover.

Evolutionary dynamics of host specialization in wood-decay fungi.

Background: The majority of wood decomposing fungi are mushroom-forming Agaricomycetes, which exhibit two main modes of plant cell wall decomposition: white rot, in which all plant cell wall components are degraded, including lignin, and brown rot, in which lignin is modified but not appreciably removed. Previous studies suggested that brown rot fungi tend to be specialists of gymnosperm hosts and that brown rot promotes gymnosperm specialization. However, these hypotheses were based on analyses of limited datasets of Agaricomycetes.

Forest Management Intensity Affects Aquatic Communities in Artificial Tree Holes.

Forest management could potentially affect organisms in all forest habitats. However, aquatic communities in water-filled tree-holes may be especially sensitive because of small population sizes, the risk of drought and potential dispersal limitation. We set up artificial tree holes in forest stands subject to different management intensities in two regions in Germany and assessed the influence of local environmental properties (tree-hole opening type, tree diameter, water volume and water temperature) as well as regional drivers (forest management intensity, tree-hole density) on tree-hole insect communities (not considering other organisms such as nematodes or rotifers), detritus content, oxygen and nutrient concentrations.

Small beetle, large-scale drivers: how regional and landscape factors affect outbreaks of the European spruce bark beetle.

Unprecedented bark beetle outbreaks have been observed for a variety of forest ecosystems recently, and damage is expected to further intensify as a consequence of climate change. In Central Europe, the response of ecosystem management to increasing infestation risk has hitherto focused largely on the stand level, while the contingency of outbreak dynamics on large-scale drivers remains poorly understood. To investigate how factors beyond the local scale contribute to the infestation risk from (Col.

Experimental Manipulation of Grassland Plant Diversity Induces Complex Shifts in Aboveground Arthropod Diversity.

Changes in producer diversity cause multiple changes in consumer communities through various mechanisms. However, past analyses investigating the relationship between plant diversity and arthropod consumers focused only on few aspects of arthropod diversity, e.g.

Landscape simplification filters species traits and drives biotic homogenization.

Biodiversity loss can affect the viability of ecosystems by decreasing the ability of communities to respond to environmental change and disturbances. Agricultural intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss and has multiple components operating at different spatial scales: from in-field management intensity to landscape-scale simplification. Here we show that landscape-level effects dominate functional community composition and can even buffer the effects of in-field management intensification on functional homogenization, and that animal communities in real-world managed landscapes show a unified response (across orders and guilds) to both landscape-scale simplification and in-field intensification.

Effects of management on aquatic tree-hole communities in temperate forests are mediated by detritus amount and water chemistry.

Arthropod communities in water-filled tree holes may be sensitive to impacts of forest management, for example via changes in environmental conditions such as resource input. We hypothesized that increasing forest management intensity (ForMI) negatively affects arthropod abundance and richness and shifts community composition and trophic structure of tree hole communities. We predicted that this shift is caused by reduced habitat and resource availability at the forest stand scale as well as reduced tree hole size, detritus amount and changed water chemistry at the tree holes scale.

Land use intensification alters ecosystem multifunctionality via loss of biodiversity and changes to functional composition.

Global change, especially land-use intensification, affects human well-being by impacting the delivery of multiple ecosystem services (multifunctionality). However, whether biodiversity loss is a major component of global change effects on multifunctionality in real-world ecosystems, as in experimental ones, remains unclear. Therefore, we assessed biodiversity, functional composition and 14 ecosystem services on 150 agricultural grasslands differing in land-use intensity.

Does the Aphid Alarm Pheromone (E)-β-farnesene Act as a Kairomone under Field Conditions?

Insect natural enemies use several environmental cues for host/prey finding, and adjust their foraging behavior according to these signals. In insects, such cues are mainly chemical, derived from the host plant or the prey itself. The aphid alarm pheromone, (E)-β-farnesene (EBF), is believed to be such a cue, because several aphid enemies are able to perceive EBF and show attractant behavior.

Functional identity and diversity of animals predict ecosystem functioning better than species-based indices.

Drastic biodiversity declines have raised concerns about the deterioration of ecosystem functions and have motivated much recent research on the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem functioning. A functional trait framework has been proposed to improve the mechanistic understanding of this relationship, but this has rarely been tested for organisms other than plants. We analysed eight datasets, including five animal groups, to examine how well a trait-based approach, compared with a more traditional taxonomic approach, predicts seven ecosystem functions below- and above-ground.

Can rove beetles (Staphylinidae) be excluded in studies focusing on saproxylic beetles in central European beech forests?

Monitoring saproxylic beetle diversity, though challenging, can help identifying relevant conservation sites or key drivers of forest biodiversity, and assessing the impact of forestry practices on biodiversity. Unfortunately, monitoring species assemblages is costly, mainly due to the time spent on identification. Excluding families which are rich in specimens and species but are difficult to identify is a frequent procedure used in ecological entomology to reduce the identification cost.

Association of extinction risk of saproxylic beetles with ecological degradation of forests in Europe.

To reduce future loss of biodiversity and to allocate conservation funds effectively, the major drivers behind large-scale extinction processes must be identified. A promising approach is to link the red-list status of species and specific traits that connect species of functionally important taxa or guilds to resources they rely on. Such traits can be used to detect the influence of anthropogenic ecosystem changes and conservation efforts on species, which allows for practical recommendations for conservation.

Plant diversity impacts decomposition and herbivory via changes in aboveground arthropods.

Loss of plant diversity influences essential ecosystem processes as aboveground productivity, and can have cascading effects on the arthropod communities in adjacent trophic levels. However, few studies have examined how those changes in arthropod communities can have additional impacts on ecosystem processes caused by them (e.g.

Differential responses of herbivores and herbivory to management in temperate European beech.

Forest management not only affects biodiversity but also might alter ecosystem processes mediated by the organisms, i.e. herbivory the removal of plant biomass by plant-eating insects and other arthropod groups.

Effects of land-use intensity on arthropod species abundance distributions in grasslands.

As a rule, communities consist of few abundant and many rare species, which is reflected in the characteristic shape of species abundance distributions (SADs). The processes that shape these SADs have been a longstanding problem for ecological research. Although many studies found strong negative effects of increasing land-use intensity on diversity, few reports consider land-use effects on SADs.

How do earthworms, soil texture and plant composition affect infiltration along an experimental plant diversity gradient in grassland?

Background: Infiltration is a key process in determining the water balance, but so far effects of earthworms, soil texture, plant species diversity and their interaction on infiltration capacity have not been studied.

Methodology/principal Findings: We measured infiltration capacity in subplots with ambient and reduced earthworm density nested in plots of different plant species (1, 4, and 16 species) and plant functional group richness and composition (1 to 4 groups; legumes, grasses, small herbs, tall herbs). In summer, earthworm presence significantly increased infiltration, whereas in fall effects of grasses and legumes on infiltration were due to plant-mediated changes in earthworm biomass.