In Europe, various conservation programs adopted to maintain or restore biodiversity have experienced differing levels of success. However, a synthesis about major factors for success of biodiversity-related conservation programs across ecosystems and national boundaries, such as incentives, subsidies, enforcement, participation, or spatial context, is missing. Using a balanced scorecard survey among experts, we analyzed and c...

The compositional heterogeneity of biotic assemblages among sites, or β‐diversity, regulates the relationship between local and regional species diversity across scales. Recent work has suggested that increased harshness of environmental conditions tends to reduce β‐diversity by decreasing the importance of stochastic processes in structuring assemblages. We investigated the effect of nutrient enrichment on the compositional h...

The differential ability of natural sediment biofilms to store and metabolize specific dissolved organic carbon (DOC) fractions was studied with a set of perfusion experiments that combined a chromatographic method for the analysis of several DOC fractions with the measurement of bacterial abundance and activity. High proportions of low‐molecular‐weight substances and polysaccharides and low but significant proportions of humi...