The breakdown of plant material fuels soil functioning and biodiversity. Currently, process understanding of global decomposition patterns and the drivers of such patterns are hampered by the lack of coherent large‐scale datasets. We buried 36,000 individual litterbags (tea bags) worldwide and found an overall negative correlation between initial mass‐loss rates and stabilization factors of plant‐derived carbon, using the Tea...

Whether species can respond evolutionarily to current climate change is crucial for the persistence of many species. Yet, very few studies have examined genetic responses to climate change in manipulated experiments carried out in natural field conditions. We examined the evolutionary response to climate change in a common annelid worm using a controlled replicated experiment where climatic conditions were manipulated in a nat...

This study investigated the impact of predicted future climatic and atmospheric conditions on soil respiration ( R S ) in a Danish Calluna‐Deschampsia‐ heathland. A fully factorial in situ experiment with treatments of elevated atmospheric CO 2 (+130 ppm), raised soil temperature (+0.4 °C) and extended summer drought (5–8% precipitation exclusion) was established in 2005. The average R S , observed in the control over 3 years...

A pan‐European, classification of the extent of environmental degradation from chemical, physical and biological pressures on fish communities as a precursor to assess the ecological status of running waters based on fish is proposed. Twenty‐four potential pressures acting on fish communities at three different spatial scales (river basin, segment and site) were identified and class boundaries for high, good, moderate, poor an...

The objective was to develop spatially based (type‐specific) methods to assess the ecological status of European rivers according to the EU Water Framework Directive. Some 15 000 samples from about 8000 sites were pre‐classified within a five‐tiered classification system based on hydromorphological and physico‐chemical pressures. The pre‐classification was used to identify reference conditions and to calibrate the assessment m...