E. Reich results 119
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The Toarcian Posidonia Shale and contemporaneously formed sediments document an interval of black shale sedimentation and organic matter accumulation in the Central European Basin System (CEBS), lasting a few hundred thousand years up to 7 myr. The remarkable stable organo-detrital depositional regime in the deeper basin was accompanied by repetitive changes from organo-detrital to detrital depositional regimes in the shallowe...
Brain anatomy of a clonal fish, the Amazon Molly (Poecilia formosa): effects of early-life environmentNARA Subscribed
During ontogeny, environmental factors can shape trait development and resource allocation to aid survival, reflecting adaptive plasticity. This may include differential investment in brain regions in response to cognitive challenges. Especially the brain anatomy of fish seems to respond readily to biotic and abiotic factors. However, we currently lack sufficient data to determine the extent to which such changes are consisten...
Elevated CO 2 and N Gradually Weaken the Influence of Diversity on Ecosystem StabilityNARA Subscribed
Biodiversity promotes ecosystem productivity and stability, positive impacts that often strengthen over time. But ongoing global changes such as rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) levels and anthropogenic nitrogen (N) deposition may modulate the impact of biodiversity on ecosystem productivity and stability over time. Using a quarter‐century grassland biodiversity‐global change experiment we show that diversity increasi...
Motivation Here, we make available a second version of the BioTIME database, which compiles records of abundance estimates for species in sample events of ecological assemblages through time. The updated version expands version 1.0 of the database by doubling the number of studies and includes substantial additional curation to the taxonomic accuracy of the records, as well as the metadata. Moreover, we now provide an R packag...
All the light we cannot see: Climate manipulations leave short and long‐term imprints in spectral reflectance of treesNARA Subscribed
Anthropogenic climate change, particularly changes in temperature and precipitation, affects plants in multiple ways. Because plants respond dynamically to stress and acclimate to changes in growing conditions, diagnosing quantitative plant‐environment relationships is a major challenge. One approach to this problem is to quantify leaf responses using spectral reflectance, which provides rapid, inexpensive, and nondestructive...
Tree diversity shapes the spectral signature of light transmittance in developing forestsNARA Subscribed
Greater tree diversity often increases forest productivity by increasing the fraction of light captured and the effectiveness of light use at the community scale. However, light may shape forest function not only as a source of energy or a cause of stress but also as a context cue: Plant photoreceptors can detect specific wavelengths of light, and plants use this information to assess their neighborhoods and adjust their patte...
Dominance and rarity in tree communities across the globe: Patterns, predictors and threatsNARA Subscribed
Aim Ecological and anthropogenic factors shift the abundances of dominant and rare tree species within local forest communities, thus affecting species composition and ecosystem functioning. To inform forest and conservation management it is important to understand the drivers of dominance and rarity in local tree communities. We answer the following research questions: (1) What are the patterns of dominance and rarity in tree...
Species interactions amplify functional group responses to elevated CO 2 and N enrichment in a 24‐year grassland experimentNARA Subscribed
Plant functional groups (FGs) differ in their response to global changes, although species within those groups also vary in such responses. Both species and FG responses to global change are likely influenced by species interactions such as inter‐specific competition and facilitation, which are prevalent in species mixtures but not monocultures. As most studies focus on responses of plants growing in either monocultures or mix...
Accounting for herbaceous communities in process‐based models will advance our understanding of “grassy” ecosystemsNARA Subscribed
Grassland and other herbaceous communities cover significant portions of Earth's terrestrial surface and provide many critical services, such as carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and food production. Forecasts of global change impacts on these services will require predictive tools, such as process‐based dynamic vegetation models. Yet, model representation of herbaceous communities and ecosystems lags substantially behin...
Herbaceous vegetation responses to experimental fire in savannas and forests depend on biome and climateNARA Subscribed
Fire–vegetation feedbacks potentially maintain global savanna and forest distributions. Accordingly, vegetation in savanna and forest ecosystems should have differential responses to fire, but fire response data for herbaceous vegetation have yet to be synthesized across biomes. Here, we examined herbaceous vegetation responses to experimental fire at 30 sites spanning four continents. Across a variety of metrics, herbaceous v...
Despite the large body of theory concerning multiple disturbances, relatively few attempts have been made to test the theoretical assumptions of how and if disturbances interact. Of particular importance is whether disturbance events are linked, as this can influence the probability and intensity of ecological change. Disturbances are linked when one disturbance event increases or decreases the likelihood or extent of another....
Traits of dominant plant species drive normalized difference vegetation index in grasslands globallyNARA Subscribed
Aim Theoretical, experimental and observational studies have shown that biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are influenced by functional community structure through two mutually non‐exclusive mechanisms: (1) the dominance effect (which relates to the traits of the dominant species); and (2) the niche partitioning effect [which relates to functional diversity (FD)]. Although both mechanisms have been studied...
The functional response of plant communities to disturbance is hypothesised to be controlled by changes in environmental conditions and evolutionary history of species within the community. However, separating these influences using direct manipulations of repeated disturbances within ecosystems is rare. We evaluated how 41 years of manipulated fire affected plant leaf economics by sampling 89 plant species across a savanna‐fo...
Soil enzymes as indicators of soil function: A step toward greater realism in microbial ecological modelingNARA Subscribed
Soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles and their complex responses to environmental changes have received increasing attention. However, large uncertainties in model predictions remain, partially due to the lack of explicit representation and parameterization of microbial processes. One great challenge is to effectively integrate rich microbial functional traits into ecosystem modeling for better predictions. Here, using soil...
Global change is impacting plant community composition, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are unclear. Using a dataset of 58 global change experiments, we tested the five fundamental mechanisms of community change: changes in evenness and richness, reordering, species gains and losses. We found 71% of communities were impacted by global change treatments, and 88% of communities that were exposed to two or more global...
Disease and fire interact to influence transitions between savanna–forest ecosystems over a multi‐decadal experimentNARA Subscribed
Global change is shifting disturbance regimes that may rapidly change ecosystems, sometimes causing ecosystems to shift between states. Interactions between disturbances such as fire and disease could have especially severe effects, but experimental tests of multi‐decadal changes in disturbance regimes are rare. Here, we surveyed vegetation for 35 years in a 54‐year fire frequency experiment in a temperate oak savanna–forest e...
Enhanced light interception and light use efficiency explain overyielding in young tree communitiesNARA Subscribed
Diverse plant communities are often more productive than mono‐specific ones. Several possible mechanisms underlie this phenomenon but their relative importance remains unknown. Here we investigated whether light interception alone or in combination with light use efficiency (LUE) of dominant and subordinate species explained greater productivity of mixtures relative to monocultures (i.e. overyielding) in 108 young experimental...