Nutrient supply is an important determinant of N fixation rates in pelagic cyanobacteria. In shallow aquatic ecosystems, benthic primary producers can affect nutrient release from the sediment to the pelagic zone, yet the relationship between benthic primary producers and pelagic N fixation is not well understood. Here, we explore the effect of benthic primary producers on benthic nutrient fluxes and pelagic N fixation rates i...

Mixed planted forests (MPFs) are often considered more resilient to climate change and provide greater environmental benefits than monocultures. Yet, monocultures dominate tree plantation systems globally. Here, we examined the motivations, barriers, and opportunities that affect forest stakeholders’ adoption of MPFs across four countries with strong yet distinct forest sectors: Brazil, France, Portugal, and Sweden. We conduct...

Ecosystem engineers impact ecosystems by changing the physical environment in which species interact. In Lake Mývatn, Iceland, larvae of the midge Tanytarsus gracilentus function as ecosystem engineers by building tubes in the sediment that solidify the benthic surface and create a 3-dimensional structure on which microalgae can grow. To assess the ecosystem-scale effect of midge engineering, we took advantage of the natural h...

Turnover in species composition often lags behind the pace of climate change, resulting in mismatches between climate and communities. However, the impact of these community‐climate disequilibria on ecosystem functions is rarely considered, and current methods for measuring disequilibria assume that species ranges were, until recently, in equilibrium with climate. Here, we develop a simple theoretical model to address both of...

We combined decadal data (23–35 y) on nutrient concentrations for nine subarctic lakes with satellite imagery of vegetation (NDVI) to link the ongoing nutrient declines to the climate change‐induced greening of landscapes. Total phosphorus water concentrations (Total‐P) showed declining trends for all nine lakes, ranging from 1.5%–3.6%/y over the last decades. For most of the lakes' drainage areas, NDVI showed a dramatic incre...

Plants produce defensive toxins to deter herbivores. In response, some specialized herbivores evolved resistance and even the capacity to sequester toxins, affecting interactions at higher trophic levels. Here, we test the hypothesis that potential natural enemies of specialized herbivores are differentially affected by plant toxins depending on their level of adaptation to the plant-herbivore system. We focus on toxic cardiac...

A major goal in ecology is to make generalizable predictions of organism responses to environmental variation based on their traits. However, straightforward relationships between traits and fitness are rare and likely to vary with environmental context. Characterizing how traits mediate demographic responses to the environment may enhance the predictions of organism responses to global change. We synthesized 15 years of demog...

Nutrient enrichment can simultaneously increase and destabilise plant biomass production, with co‐limitation by multiple nutrients potentially intensifying these effects. Here, we test how factorial additions of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium with essential nutrients (K+) affect the stability (mean/standard deviation) of aboveground biomass in 34 grasslands over 7 years. Destabilisation with fertilisation was preva...

Spatial rarity is often used to predict extinction risk, but rarity can also occur temporally. Perhaps more relevant in the context of global change is whether a species is core to a community (persistent) or transient (intermittently present), with transient species often susceptible to human activities that reduce niche space. Using 5–12 yr of data on 1,447 plant species from 49 grasslands on five continents, we show that lo...

Argininosuccinate lyase (ASL) is essential for the NO-dependent regulation of tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and thus for catecholamine production. Using a conditional mouse model with loss of ASL in catecholamine neurons, we demonstrate that ASL is expressed in dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta, including the ALDH1A1 + subpopulation that is pivotal for the pathogenesis of Parkinson disease (PD). Neuronal l...

The effects of altered nutrient supplies and herbivore density on species diversity vary with spatial scale, because coexistence mechanisms are scale dependent. This scale dependence may alter the shape of the species–area relationship (SAR), which can be described by changes in species richness ( S ) as a power function of the sample area ( A ): S = cA z , where c and z are constants. We analysed the effects of experimental m...

The settlement of spores and larvae on hard substrates has been shown to be influenced by many factors, but few studies have evaluated how underlying bedrock may influence recruitment. The characteristics of coastal rock types such as color, heat capacity, mineral size, and free energy have all been implicated in settlement success. We examined the influence of naturally occurring rock types on the initial attachment of zygote...

Human activities are enriching many of Earth’s ecosystems with biologically limiting mineral nutrients such as nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). In grasslands, this enrichment generally reduces plant diversity and increases productivity. The widely demonstrated positive effect of diversity on productivity suggests a potential negative feedback, whereby nutrient‐induced declines in diversity reduce the initial gains in productiv...

Soil nitrogen (N) availability is critical for grassland functioning. However, human activities have increased the supply of biologically limiting nutrients, and changed the density and identity of mammalian herbivores. These anthropogenic changes may alter net soil N mineralization (soil net N min ), that is, the net balance between N mineralization and immobilization, which could severely impact grassland structure and funct...