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Islands are model systems for testing and developing ecological theories. Despite extensive research on island biodiversity, the importance of the biogeographic context for biodiversity–stability relationships is poorly understood. We addressed this knowledge gap by integrating the Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography (ETIB) with a functional perspective to explore island biodiversity–stability relationships. We conducted...
Persistent Effects of Landscape Context on Recruitment Dynamics During Secondary Succession of Tropical ForestsNARA Subscribed
Large‐scale reforestation is promoted as an important strategy to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. A persistent challenge for efforts to restore ecosystems at scale is how to accelerate ecological processes, particularly natural regeneration. Yet, despite being recognized as an important barrier to the recovery of diverse plant communities in tropical agricultural landscapes, the impacts of dispersal limitation o...
No general support for functional diversity enhancing resilience across terrestrial plant communitiesNARA Subscribed
Aim Understanding the mechanisms promoting resilience in plant communities is crucial in times of increasing disturbance and global environmental change. Here, we present the first meta‐analysis evaluating the relationship between functional diversity and resilience of plant communities. Specifically, we tested whether the resilience of plant communities is positively correlated with interspecific trait variation (following th...
Tropical forest succession increases tree taxonomic and functional richness but decreases evennessNARA Subscribed
Aim Successional changes in functional diversity provide insights into community assembly by indicating how species are filtered into local communities based on their traits. Here, we assess successional changes in taxonomic and functional richness, evenness and redundancy along gradients of climate, soil pH and forest cover. Location Neotropics. Time period Last 0–100 years. Major taxa studied Trees. Methods We used 22 forest...
Tree demographic strategies largely overlap across succession in Neotropical wet and dry forest communitiesNARA Subscribed
Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies—combinations of growth, mortality and recruitment rates—of the tree species in the community. However, our understanding of de...
Motivation Due to language and networking barriers, global initiatives to compile trait data often fail to integrate data from sources in non‐English languages or scientists that largely speak and write in non‐English languages. To illustrate the potential for regional databases to fill gaps in trait data, and how such databases may fill critical gaps in global biodiversity databases, we built the Rasgos‐CL Database. Rasgos‐CL...
Successional shifts in tree demographic strategies in wet and dry Neotropical forestsNARA Subscribed
Aim Tropical forest succession and associated changes in community composition are driven by species demographic rates, but how demographic strategies shift during succession remains unclear. Our goal was to identify generalities in demographic trade‐offs and successional shifts in demographic strategies across Neotropical forests that cover a large rainfall gradient and to test whether the current conceptual model of tropical...
Tree diversity effects on soil microbial biomass and respiration are context dependent across forest diversity experimentsNARA Subscribed
Aim Soil microorganisms are essential for the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Although soil microbial communities and functions are linked to tree species composition and diversity, there has been no comprehensive study of the generality or context dependence of these relationships. Here, we examine tree diversity–soil microbial biomass and respiration relationships across environmental gradients using a global network...
Water and energy availability mediate biodiversity patterns along an elevational gradient in the tropical AndesNARA Subscribed
Aim How tree taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity vary with elevation at multiple spatial scales may provide new insights into the ecological and evolutionary processes influencing biogeographical patterns. The effect of water‐ and energy‐related climatic variables on forests diversity across elevations, as well as how clades have evolved on and established across mountain regions lack consensus. Here, we tested whether change...
Three decades of research have demonstrated that biodiversity can promote the functioning of ecosystems. Yet, it is unclear whether the positive effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning will persist under various types of global environmental change drivers. We conducted a meta‐analysis of 46 factorial experiments manipulating both species richness and the environment to test how global change drivers (i.e. warming, dr...
Successional syndromes of saplings in tropical secondary forests emerge from environment‐dependent trait–demography relationshipsNARA Subscribed
Identifying generalisable processes that underpin population dynamics is crucial for understanding successional patterns. While longitudinal or chronosequence data are powerful tools for doing so, the traditional focus on community‐level shifts in taxonomic and functional composition rather than species‐level trait–demography relationships has made generalisation difficult. Using joint species distribution models, we demonstra...
Biotic homogenization destabilizes ecosystem functioning by decreasing spatial asynchronyNARA Subscribed
Our planet is facing significant changes of biodiversity across spatial scales. Although the negative effects of local biodiversity (α diversity) loss on ecosystem stability are well documented, the consequences of biodiversity changes at larger spatial scales, in particular biotic homogenization, that is, reduced species turnover across space (β diversity), remain poorly known. Using data from 39 grassland biodiversity experi...
Aim Biodiversity and ecosystem productivity vary across the globe, and considerable effort has been made to describe their relationships. Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research has traditionally focused on how experimentally controlled species richness affects net primary productivity ( S → NPP) at small spatial grains. In contrast, the influence of productivity on richness (NPP → S ) has been explored at many grains...
Current climate, isolation and history drive global patterns of tree phylogenetic endemismNARA Subscribed
Aim We mapped global patterns of tree phylogenetic endemism (PE) to identify hotspots and test hypotheses about possible drivers. Specifically, we tested hypotheses related to current climate, geographical characteristics and historical conditions and assessed their relative importance in shaping PE patterns. Location Global. Time period We used the present distribution of trees, and predictors covering conditions from the mid...
TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open accessNARA Subscribed
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodivers...
The unseen invaders: introduced earthworms as drivers of change in plant communities in North American forests (a meta‐analysis)NARA Subscribed
Globally, biological invasions can have strong impacts on biodiversity as well as ecosystem functioning. While less conspicuous than introduced aboveground organisms, introduced belowground organisms may have similarly strong effects. Here, we synthesize for the first time the impacts of introduced earthworms on plant diversity and community composition in North American forests. We conducted a meta‐analysis using a total of 6...
Drivers of temporal changes in temperate forest plant diversity vary across spatial scalesNARA Subscribed
Global biodiversity is affected by numerous environmental drivers. Yet, the extent to which global environmental changes contribute to changes in local diversity is poorly understood. We investigated biodiversity changes in a meta‐analysis of 39 resurvey studies in European temperate forests (3988 vegetation records in total, 17–75 years between the two surveys) by assessing the importance of (i) coarse‐resolution (i.e., among...
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