Contrasting resistance and resilience to extreme drought and late spring frost in five major European tree species.

Extreme climate events (ECEs) such as severe droughts, heat waves, and late spring frosts are rare but exert a paramount role in shaping tree species distributions. The frequency of such ECEs is expected to increase with climate warming, threatening the sustainability of temperate forests. Here, we analyzed 2,844 tree-ring width series of five dominant European tree species from 104 Swiss sites ranging from 400 to 2,200 m a.

Dispersal limitations and historical factors determine the biogeography of specialized terrestrial protists.

Recent studies show that soil eukaryotic diversity is immense and dominated by micro-organisms. However, it is unclear to what extent the processes that shape the distribution of diversity in plants and animals also apply to micro-organisms. Major diversification events in multicellular organisms have often been attributed to long-term climatic and geological processes, but the impact of such processes on protist diversity has received much less attention as their distribution has often been believed to be largely cosmopolitan.

Assessing Understory Complexity in Beech-dominated Forests ( L.) in Central Europe-From Managed to Primary Forests.

Understory vegetation influences several ecosystem services and functions of European beech ( L.) forests. Despite this knowledge on the importance of understory vegetation, it is still difficult to measure its three-dimensional characteristics in a quantitative manner.

Tree-ring isotopes capture interannual vegetation productivity dynamics at the biome scale.

Historical and future trends in net primary productivity (NPP) and its sensitivity to global change are largely unknown because of the lack of long-term, high-resolution data. Here we test whether annually resolved tree-ring stable carbon (δC) and oxygen (δO) isotopes can be used as proxies for reconstructing past NPP. Stable isotope chronologies from four sites within three distinct hydroclimatic environments in the eastern United States (US) were compared in time and space against satellite-derived NPP products, including the long-term Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS3g) NPP (1982-2011), the newest high-resolution Landsat NPP (1986-2015), and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS, 2001-2015) NPP.

Timing of concurrent visual stimuli determines modulation of saccadic amplitude.

The temporal relation of competing visual stimuli may determine the corresponding oculomotor response. In this study we systematically varied the temporal coincidence of two conflicting stimuli and investigated saccades that were elicited from such stimuli. We varied the time of presentation of two identical spatially separated stimuli between 0 and +165 ms and measured the amplitude of the saccade elicited by these stimuli using infrared eye tracking.

Sphagnum Species Modulate their Phenolic Profiles and Mycorrhizal Colonization of Surrounding Andromeda polifolia along Peatland Microhabitats.

Sphagnum mosses mediate long-term carbon accumulation in peatlands. Given their functional role as keystone species, it is important to consider their responses to ecological gradients and environmental changes through the production of phenolics. We compared the extent to which Sphagnum phenolic production was dependent on species, microhabitats and season, and how surrounding dwarf shrubs responded to Sphagnum phenolics.

Unchanged risk of frost exposure for subalpine and alpine plants after snowmelt in Switzerland despite climate warming.

The length of the snow-free season is a key factor regulating plant phenology and shaping plant community composition in cold regions. While global warming has significantly advanced the time of snowmelt and the growth period at all elevations in the Swiss Alps, it remains unclear if it has altered the likelihood of frost risk for alpine plants. Here, we analyzed the influence of the snowmelt timing on the risk of frost exposure for subalpine and alpine plants shortly after snowmelt, i.

Author Correction: Environment and host as large-scale controls of ectomycorrhizal fungi.

Change history: In the HTML version of this Article, author 'Filipa Cox' had no affiliation in the author list, although she was correctly associated with affiliation 3 in the PDF. In addition, the blue circles for 'oak' were missing from Extended Data Fig. 1.

Long-term regeneration of a tropical plant community after sand mining.

Sandy coastal plant communities in tropical regions have been historically under strong anthropic pressure. In Brazil, these systems shelter communities with highly plastic plant species. However, the potential of these systems to regenerate without human assistance after disturbances has hardly been examined.

Topsoil structure stability in a restored floodplain: Impacts of fluctuating water levels, soil parameters and ecosystem engineers.

Ecosystem services provided by floodplains are strongly controlled by the structural stability of soils. The development of a stable structure in floodplain soils is affected by a complex and poorly understood interplay of hydrological, physico-chemical and biological processes. This paper aims at analysing relations between fluctuating groundwater levels, soil physico-chemical and biological parameters on soil structure stability in a restored floodplain.

Nitrogen concentration in moss compared with N load in precipitation and with total N deposition in Switzerland.

Intensification of farming and an increase in motorised traffic have led to elevated nitrogen (N) emissions and thus to eutrophication of the environment, which threatens the nutrient balance in ecosystems. Earlier studies have demonstrated the suitability of mosses as biomonitors for measuring N deposition by comparing the N concentration in moss with that in precipitation. In our study however, we extended the comparison to the dry deposition of gases (nitrogen dioxide, nitric acid, ammonia) and aerosols (nitrate, ammonium), which, together with the N in precipitation, represent the main contributions to total N deposition.

Close-range laser scanning in forests: towards physically based semantics across scales.

Laser scanning with its unique measurement concept holds the potential to revolutionize the way we assess and quantify three-dimensional vegetation structure. Modern laser systems used at close range, be it on terrestrial, mobile or unmanned aerial platforms, provide dense and accurate three-dimensional data whose information just waits to be harvested. However, the transformation of such data to information is not as straightforward as for airborne and space-borne approaches, where typically empirical models are built using ground truth of target variables.

Impacts of salvage logging on biodiversity: a meta-analysis.

Logging to "salvage" economic returns from forests affected by natural disturbances has become increasingly prevalent globally. Despite potential negative effects on biodiversity, salvage logging is often conducted, even in areas otherwise excluded from logging and reserved for nature conservation, inter alia because strategic priorities for post-disturbance management are widely lacking.A review of the existing literature revealed that most studies investigating the effects of salvage logging on biodiversity have been conducted less than 5 years following natural disturbances, and focused on non-saproxylic organisms.

How to kill a tree: empirical mortality models for 18 species and their performance in a dynamic forest model.

Dynamic Vegetation Models (DVMs) are designed to be suitable for simulating forest succession and species range dynamics under current and future conditions based on mathematical representations of the three key processes regeneration, growth, and mortality. However, mortality formulations in DVMs are typically coarse and often lack an empirical basis, which increases the uncertainty of projections of future forest dynamics and hinders their use for developing adaptation strategies to climate change. Thus, sound tree mortality models are highly needed.

Fresh and composted industrial sludge restore soil functions in surface soil of degraded agricultural land.

A field study was conducted to test the potential of 5-year consecutive application of fresh industrial sludge (FIS) and composted industrial sludge (CIS) to restore soil functions at surface (0-15cm) and subsurface (15-30cm) of the degraded agricultural land. Sludge amendments increased soil fertility parameters including total organic carbon (TOC), soil available nitrogen (SAN), soil available phosphorus (SAP) and soil available potassium (SAK) at 0-15cm depth. Soil enzyme activities i.

Oak tree-rings record spatial-temporal pollution trends from different sources in Terni (Central Italy).

Monitoring atmospheric pollution in industrial areas near urban center is essential to infer past levels of contamination and to evaluate the impact for environmental health and safety. The main aim of this study was to understand if the chemical composition of tree-ring wood can be used for monitoring spatial-temporal variability of pollutants in Terni, Central Italy, one of the most polluted towns in Italy. Tree cores were taken from 32 downy oaks (Quercus pubescens) located at different distances from several pollutant sources, including a large steel factory.

Taxonomic and functional turnover are decoupled in European peat bogs.

In peatland ecosystems, plant communities mediate a globally significant carbon store. The effects of global environmental change on plant assemblages are expected to be a factor in determining how ecosystem functions such as carbon uptake will respond. Using vegetation data from 56 Sphagnum-dominated peat bogs across Europe, we show that in these ecosystems plant species aggregate into two major clusters that are each defined by shared response to environmental conditions.

Tipping point in plant-fungal interactions under severe drought causes abrupt rise in peatland ecosystem respiration.

Ecosystems are increasingly prone to climate extremes, such as drought, with long-lasting effects on both plant and soil communities and, subsequently, on carbon (C) cycling. However, recent studies underlined the strong variability in ecosystem's response to droughts, raising the issue of nonlinear responses in plant and soil communities. The conundrum is what causes ecosystems to shift in response to drought.

Frost hardening and dehardening potential in temperate trees from winter to budburst.

We investigated how deciduous trees can adjust their freezing resistance in response to temperature during the progress of the ecodormancy phase, from midwinter to budburst. We regularly sampled twigs of four different temperate deciduous tree species from January to the leaf-out date. Using computer-controlled freezers and climate chambers, the freezing resistance of buds was measured directly after sampling and also after the application of artificial hardening and dehardening treatments, simulating cold and warm spells.

Terrestrial reproduction as an adaptation to steep terrain in African toads.

How evolutionary novelties evolve is a major question in evolutionary biology. It is widely accepted that changes in environmental conditions shift the position of selective optima, and advancements in phylogenetic comparative approaches allow the rigorous testing of such correlated transitions. A longstanding question in vertebrate biology has been the evolution of terrestrial life histories in amphibians and here, by investigating African bufonids, we test whether terrestrial modes of reproduction have evolved as adaptations to particular abiotic habitat parameters.

Genetic Determinism vs. Phenotypic Plasticity in Protist Morphology.

Untangling the relationships between morphology and phylogeny is key to building a reliable taxonomy, but is especially challenging for protists, where the existence of cryptic or pseudocryptic species makes finding relevant discriminant traits difficult. Here we use Hyalosphenia papilio (a testate amoeba) as a model species to investigate the contribution of phylogeny and phenotypic plasticity in its morphology. We study the response of H.

Larix decidua δO tree-ring cellulose mainly reflects the isotopic signature of winter snow in a high-altitude glacial valley of the European Alps.

We analyzed the chronologies of cellulose stable isotopes (δC and δO) and tree-ring widths from European larch (Larix decidua) in a high-altitude site (2190ma.s.l.