The forest floor (FF) plays a key role in carbon, nutrient, and water cycling. It is the biologically most active compartment of forest soils, highly responsive to environmental conditions. Yet, its response to current changes in environmental conditions and forest management is understudied. Temperate forests are among the best studied ecosystems globally, providing the necessary ecological and biogeochemical background infor...

The increasing production, use and emission of synthetic chemicals into the environment represents a major driver of global change. The large number of synthetic chemicals, limited knowledge on exposure patterns and effects in organisms and their interaction with other global change drivers hamper the prediction of effects in ecosystems. However, recent advances in biomolecular and computational methods are promising to improv...

The breaking apart of magma into fragments is intimately related to the eruptive style and thus the nature and footprint of volcanic hazards. The size and shape distributions of the fragments, in turn, affect the efficiency of heat transfer within pyroclastic plumes and currents and the settling velocity, and so the residence time, of particles in the atmosphere. Fundamental work relating the glass transition to the fragmentat...

Magmas vesiculate during ascent, producing complex interconnected pore networks, which can act as outgassing pathways and then deflate or compact to volcanic plugs. Similarly, in-conduit fragmentation events during dome-forming eruptions create open systems transiently, before welding causes pore sealing. The percolation threshold is the first-order transition between closed- and open-system degassing dynamics. Here, we use ti...

While metabolic theory predicts variance in population density within communities depending on population average body masses, the ecological stoichiometry concept relates density variation across communities to varying resource stoichiometry. Using a data set including biomass densities of 4959 populations of soil invertebrates across 48 forest sites we combined these two frameworks. We analyzed how the scaling of biomass den...

Soils are extremely rich in biodiversity, and soil organisms play pivotal roles in supporting terrestrial life, but the role that individual plants and plant communities play in influencing the diversity and functioning of soil food webs remains highly debated. Plants, as primary producers and providers of resources to the soil food web, are of vital importance for the composition, structure, and functioning of soil communitie...

The global decline in biodiversity has generated concern over the consequences for ecosystem functioning and services. Although ecosystem functions driven by soil microorganisms such as plant productivity, decomposition, and nutrient cycling are of particular importance, interrelationships between plant diversity and soil microorganisms are poorly understood. We analyzed the response of soil microorganisms to variations in pla...