The Hagen-Balve Reef Complex of the northern Rhenish Massif, Germany, is one of the best examples for the globally widespread Givetian to Frasnian reefs. At its eastern end, in the Hönne Valley, it reaches up to 1000 metres in thickness. In general, there is limited knowledge concerning the faunas and palaeoecology of Rhenish initial reef phases. A unique section at Binolen exposes the sharp boundary between the underlying, si...

Community composition is a primary determinant of how biodiversity change influences ecosystem functioning and, therefore, the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF). We examine the consequences of community composition across six structurally realistic plant community models. We find that a positive correlation between species’ functioning in monoculture versus their dominance in mixture with regard...

Nutrient enrichment is widespread throughout grassland systems and expected to increase during the Anthropocene. Trophic interactions, like aboveground herbivory, have been shown to mitigate its effect on plant diversity. Belowground herbivory may also impact these habitats’ response to nutrient enrichment, but its influence is much less understood, and likely to depend on factors such as the herbivores’ preference for dominan...

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...

Stochasticity is a core component of ecology, as it underlies key processes that structure and create variability in nature. Despite its fundamental importance in ecological systems, the concept is often treated as synonymous with unpredictability in community ecology, and studies tend to focus on single forms of stochasticity rather than taking a more holistic view. This has led to multiple narratives for how stochasticity me...

Habitat destruction is the single greatest anthropogenic threat to biodiversity. Decades of research on this issue have led to the accumulation of hundreds of data sets comparing species assemblages in larger, intact, habitats to smaller, more fragmented, habitats. Despite this, little synthesis or consensus has been achieved, primarily because of non‐standardized sampling methodology and analyses of notoriously scale‐dependen...

Because biodiversity is multidimensional and scale‐dependent, it is challenging to estimate its change. However, it is unclear (1) how much scale‐dependence matters for empirical studies, and (2) if it does matter, how exactly we should quantify biodiversity change. To address the first question, we analysed studies with comparisons among multiple assemblages, and found that rarefaction curves frequently crossed, implying reve...

Aim Biodiversity loss is a key component of biodiversity change and can impact ecosystem services. However, estimation of the loss has focused mostly on per‐species extinction rates measured over a limited number of spatial scales, with little theory linking small‐scale extirpations to global extinctions. Here, we provide such a link by introducing the relationship between area and the number of extinctions (number of extincti...

Aim It has been recently suggested that different ‘unified theories of biodiversity and biogeography’ can be characterized by three common ‘minimal sufficient rules’: (1) species abundance distributions follow a hollow curve, (2) species show intraspecific aggregation, and (3) species are independently placed with respect to other species. Here, we translate these qualitative rules into a quantitative framework and assess if t...

Aim Patterns that relate species richness with fragment area (the species–area relationship, SAR ) and with isolation (the species–isolation relationship, SIR ) are well documented. However, those that relate species density – the number of species within a standardized area – with fragment area (D‐ SAR ) or isolation (D‐ SIR ) have not been sufficiently explored, despite the potential for such an analysis to disentangle the u...