Seagrass meadows are key blue carbon (C) ecosystems, storing large amounts of organic C over centuries. Their climate benefits may be reduced by methane (CH 4 ) emissions, whose microbial and environmental descriptors in Zostera noltii meadows, dominant seagrass in North‐Western Europe, remain poorly understood. We studied CH 4 fluxes, CH 4 ‐producing and consuming microbial communities and sediment physicochemical parameters...

The long‐term success of protected and conserved areas depends on their capacity to remain relevant to human society while maintaining diverse, functional ecosystems. However, despite long‐standing interest in applying complex systems approaches to foster protected area (PA) social–ecological resilience and adaptive capacity, a gap between theory and practice remains. We reviewed the evolution of overarching principles for res...

Aim Plant functional traits can influence interaction outcomes between nurse and target plants through a “functional trait match”, which occurs when the traits of nurse plants ameliorate their environment, and target plants possess traits that allow them to benefit from this ameliorated environment. We investigated how the traits of putative nurse species affect interaction outcomes across global drylands and determined the fu...

Mountainous regions typically harbour high plant diversity but are also characterised by low sampling intensity. Coarse-scale species distribution models can provide insights into the distribution of poorly sampled species, but the required bioclimatic data are often limited in these landscapes. In comparison, several environmental factors that vary over relatively fine scales in mountain environments (e.g. measures of topogra...

The theory and practice of adaptive management and adaptive governance have been widely studied in the complex social contexts that mediate how humans interact with ecosystems. Adaptive governance is thought to enable adaptive management in such contexts. In this study, we examine four often-used principles of adaptive governance (polycentric institutions, collaboration, social learning and complexity thinking) to develop a fr...

Aim Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β‐diversity) is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β‐diversity is to evaluate directional variation in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distance. We provide the first global synthesis of taxonomic and functional distance decay...