Fishing-down-marine-food-webs has resulted in alarming declines of various species worldwide. Benthic rays are one examples of such overexploited species. On tidal flats, these rays are highly abundant and play an ecologically important role. They use tidal flats as refuge, feeding and resting grounds, during which they bury into the sediment, which results in sediment bioturbation. Changes in bioturbation intensity, following...

The coexistence of different species of large herbivores (ungulates) in grasslands and savannas has fascinated ecologists for decades. However, changes in climate, land‐use and trophic structure of ecosystems increasingly jeopardise the persistence of such diverse assemblages. Body size has been used successfully to explain ungulate niche differentiation with regard to food requirements and predation sensitivity. But this sing...

Coastal food webs can be supported by local benthic or pelagic primary producers and by the import of organic matter. Distinguishing between these energy sources is essential for our understanding of ecosystem functioning. However, the relative contribution of these components to the food web at the landscape scale is often unclear, as many studies lack good taxonomic and spatial resolution across large areas. Here, using stab...

Trait‐based community assembly theory suggests that trait variation among co‐occurring species is shaped by two main processes: abiotic filtering, important in stressful environments and promoting similarity, and competition, more important in productive environments and promoting dissimilarity. Previous studies have indeed found trait similarity to decline along productivity gradients. However, these studies have always been...

Abiotic soil properties, plant community composition, and herbivory all have been reported as important factors influencing the composition of soil communities. However, most studies thus far have considered these factors in isolation, whereas they strongly interact in the field. Here, we study how grazing by vertebrate herbivores influences the soil nematode community composition of a floodplain grassland while we account for...

Mammalian herbivores can have pronounced effects on plant diversity but are currently declining in many productive ecosystems through direct extirpation, habitat loss and fragmentation, while being simultaneously introduced as livestock in other, often unproductive, ecosystems that lacked such species during recent evolutionary times. The biodiversity consequences of these changes are still poorly understood. We experimentally...