As urbanization and transport demands rise, railway systems face higher risks from operational disruptions due to system failures and climate-related impacts, especially in urban areas. Understanding water flow and distribution beneath railway embankments is crucial not only for assessing potential contaminant transport in soil and groundwater but also for identifying possible structural weaknesses. This study implements numer...

Soil-dwelling insect pests may cause considerable damage to crops worldwide, and their belowground lifestyle makes them hard to control. Amongst the most promising control agents for subterranean pests are soilborne entomopathogenic fungi (EPF) such as Metarhizium brunneum . Albeit EPF can be highly pathogenic to their target pest species under laboratory conditions, their efficacy in the field is often limited due to adverse...

Intensified agriculture, a driver of biodiversity loss, can diminish ecosystem functions and their stability. Biodiversity can increase functional redundancy and is expected to stabilize ecosystem functions. Few studies, however, have explored how agricultural intensity affects functional redundancy and its link with ecosystem function stability. Here, within a continental‐wide study, we assess how functional redundancy of see...

Understanding trophic interactions in agroecosystems is crucial for harnessing ecosystem services such as pest control, thus enabling a reduction in pesticide use. Carabid beetles (Coleoptera: Carabidae) have the potential to regulate not only insect pests but also weed seeds and slugs. The aim of this study was to investigate the food choice of different carabid species in the experimental setting of a cereal field with varyi...

Fish are both consumers and prey, and as such part of a dynamic trophic network. Measuring how they are trophically linked, both directly and indirectly, to other species is vital to comprehend the mechanisms driving alterations in fish communities in space and time. Moreover, this knowledge also helps to understand how fish communities respond to environmental change and delivers important information for implementing managem...

Functional redundancy can increase the resilience of ecosystem processes by providing insurance against species loss and the effects of abundance fluctuations. However, due to the difficulty of assessing individual species’ contributions and the lack of a metric allowing for a quantification of redundancy within communities, few attempts have been made to estimate redundancy for individual ecosystem processes. We present a new...

Carabid beetles are abundant in temperate agroecosystems and can play a pivotal role as biocontrol agents. While there is good knowledge regarding their effects on invertebrate pests in some systems, comparably little is known on the rate of seed feeding under field conditions. Molecular approaches are ideally suited for investigating carabid feeding interactions; to date, however, they have only been applied to animal prey. W...

Primary succession on bare ground surrounded by intact ecosystems is, during its first stages, characterized by predator‐dominated arthropod communities. However, little is known on what prey sustains these predators at the start of succession and which factors drive the structure of these food webs. As prey availability can be extremely patchy and episodic in pioneer stages, trophic networks might be highly variable. Moreover...

Pioneer communities establishing themselves in the barren terrain in front of glacier forelands consist principally of predator species such as carabid beetles and lycosid spiders. The fact that so many different predators can co‐inhabit an area with no apparent primary production was initially explained by allochthonous material deposited in these forelands. However, whether these populations can be sustained on allochthonous...

Belowground herbivores impact plant performance, thereby inducing changes in plant community composition, which potentially leads to cascading effects onto higher trophic levels and ecosystem processes and productivity. Among soil‐living insects, external root‐chewing generalist herbivores have the strongest impact on plants. However, the lack of knowledge on their feeding behaviour under field conditions considerably hampers...