The biodiversity of lake ecosystems is partly shaped by a variety of local environmental factors that collectively form the lake’s waterscape. These factors range from in-lake variables, such as the structure of habitats and aquatic communities, and the physical and chemical conditions of the water, to variables related to lake geomorphology, lake compartments and history (e.g., lake morphometry, habitat identity, and origin),...

Decomposition of plant litter is a key ecological process in streams, whose contribution to the global carbon cycle is large relative to their extent on Earth. We examined the mechanisms underlying the temperature sensitivity (TS) of instream decomposition and forecast effects of climate warming on this process. Comparing data from 41 globally distributed sites, we assessed the TS of microbial and total decomposition using lit...

Mixotrophy, a physiological trait combining autotrophy and heterotrophy in one organism, significantly contributes to energy and matter transfer in aquatic ecosystems. However, understanding how environmental factors influence mixoplankton success across freshwater ecosystems has been uncertain. The grand écart hypothesis (GEH) posits that light and nutrient availability are key components of mixotrophs' niche, suggesting that...

Aim The relationship between body size and trophic position (BS–TP) typically exhibits a positive correlation in aquatic foodwebs, but the strength of this relationship is contingent on ecosystem type and climate. Different hypotheses have been proposed to elucidate climate and ecosystem type effects on the BS–TP relationship for ray‐finned fish. However, our understanding of whether such a relationship evolved in a correlated...

Encounters between flowers and invertebrates are key events for the functioning of tropical forests. Assessing the structure of networks composed of the interactions between those partners leads to a better understanding of ecosystem functioning and the effects of environmental factors on ecological processes. Gathering such data is, however, costly and time‐consuming, especially in the highly diverse tropics. We aimed to prov...

Animals can be important in modulating ecosystem‐level nutrient cycling, although their importance varies greatly among species and ecosystems. Nutrient cycling rates of individual animals represent valuable data for testing the predictions of important frameworks such as the Metabolic Theory of Ecology ( MTE ) and ecological stoichiometry ( ES ). They also represent an important set of functional traits that may reflect both...

The relative importance of species richness and identity for the diversity–function relationship remains controversial. We mechanistically explored the potential contribution of ecosystem processes complexity (EPC; i.e., the number of pathways and mechanisms through which an ecosystem process can be directly and/or indirectly affected by species and/or their interactions) to the resolution of this controversy. We hypothesized...