Traditional mammalian overwintering strategies emphasize energy storage via fat accumulation coupled with hibernation or migration. However, niche exploitation may enable alternative strategies that circumvent reliance on lipid reserves. Here, we report a novel overwintering paradigm in the Rhinolophus macrotis group, a clade of auditory‐specialized bats characterized by low‐frequency echolocation and enlarged external ears (p...

Precipitation fluctuations strongly influence biomass production and its stability of terrestrial ecosystems. However, our understanding of the extent to which plant communities adjust their water‐use strategies in response to non‐growing season precipitation variations remains limited. Our 5‐year snow manipulation experiment in a semi‐arid grassland, complemented with paired stable isotope measurements of δ 18 O and δ 13 C fo...

While the positive relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning is frequently observed and often attributed to direct plant–plant interactions, it remains unclear whether and how the effects of plant diversity endure through soil legacy effects, particularly at the level of genotypic diversity. We manipulated the genotypic diversity of Scirpus mariqueter and tested its soil legacy effects on a conspecific phy...

Soil microbes have long been recognized to substantially affect the coexistence of pairwise plant species across terrestrial ecosystems. However, projecting their impacts on the coexistence of multispecies plant systems remains a pressing challenge. To address this challenge, we conducted a greenhouse experiment with 540 seedlings of five tree species in a subtropical forest in China and evaluated microbial effects on multispe...

Biodiversity across multiple trophic levels is required to maintain multiple ecosystem functions. Yet it remains unclear how multitrophic diversity and species interactions regulate ecosystem multifunctionality. Here, combining data from 9 different trophic groups (including trees, shrubs, herbs, leaf mites, small mammals, bacteria, pathogenic fungi, saprophytic fungi, and symbiotic fungi) and 13 ecosystem functions related to...

Elucidating the variation of allocation pattern of ecosystem net primary productivity ( NPP ) and its underlying mechanisms is critically important for understanding the changes of aboveground and belowground ecosystem functions. Under optimal partitioning theory, plants should allocate more NPP to the organ that acquires the most limiting resource, and this expectation has been widely used to explain and predict NPP allocatio...

Conspecific negative density dependence ( CNDD ) has been recognized as a key mechanism underlying species coexistence, especially in tropical forests. Recently, some studies have reported that seedling survival is also negatively correlated with the phylogenetic relatedness between neighbors and focal individuals, termed phylogenetic negative density dependence ( PNDD ). In contrast to CNDD or PNDD , shared habitat requiremen...