The vaginal ecosystem is a key component of women's health. It also represents an ideal system for ecologists to investigate the consequence of perturbations on species diversity and emerging properties between organizational levels. Here, we study how exposure to different types of menstrual products is linked to microbial, immunological, demographic, and behavioural measurements in a cohort of young adult women who reported...

Ecosystems integrity and services are threatened by anthropogenic global changes. Mitigating and adapting to these changes require knowledge of ecosystem functioning in the expected novel environments, informed in large part through experimentation and modelling. This paper describes 13 advanced controlled environment facilities for experimental ecosystem studies, herein termed ecotrons, open to the international community. Ec...

The impact of species richness and functional diversity of plants on ecosystem water vapor fluxes has been little investigated. To address this knowledge gap, we combined a lysimeter setup in a controlled environment facility (Ecotron) with large ecosystem samples/monoliths originating from a long‐term biodiversity experiment (The Jena Experiment) and a modeling approach. Our goals were (1) quantifying the impact of plant spec...

Summary Halite endoliths in the Atacama Desert represent one of the most extreme ecosystems on Earth. Cultivation‐independent methods were used to examine the functional adaptations of the microbial consortia inhabiting halite nodules. The community was dominated by haloarchaea and functional analysis attributed most of the autotrophic CO 2 fixation to one unique cyanobacterium. The assembled 1.1 Mbp genome of a novel nanohalo...

Summary The A tacama D esert is one of the oldest and driest deserts in the world, and its hyper‐arid core is described as ‘the most barren region imaginable’. We used a combination of high‐throughput sequencing and microscopy methods to characterize the endolithic microbial assemblages of halite pinnacles (salt rocks) collected in several hyper‐arid areas of the desert. We found communities dominated by archaea that relied on...

Little is known about the role of plant functional diversity for ecosystem‐level carbon (C) fluxes. To fill this knowledge gap, we translocated monoliths hosting communities with four and 16 sown species from a long‐term grassland biodiversity experiment (‘The Jena Experiment’) into a controlled environment facility for ecosystem research (Ecotron). This allowed quantifying the effects of plant diversity on ecosystem C fluxes...

Over the past 100 years, Arctic temperatures have increased at almost twice the global average rate. One consequence is the acceleration of glacier retreat, exposing new habitats that are colonized by microorganisms whose diversity and function are unknown. Here, we characterized bacterial diversity along two approximately parallel chronosequences in an Arctic glacier forefield that span six time points following glacier retre...