Robin Pakeman results 33
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Climate and Land Cover Change Transform Functional Identity and Reduce Functional Diversity in European GrasslandsNARA Subscribed
Aim European grasslands rank among the most species‐rich ecosystems at small spatial scales, yet their biodiversity and functioning face significant threats from climate change and land‐use intensification. Functional traits more effectively explain ecosystem functions (EFs) than species identity or diversity. This study examines how future climate and land cover changes will shape grassland functional composition, addressing...
Impacts of abundance and habitat area weighting in allocating species trends to habitatsNARA Subscribed
The dynamics of species depend on the management of their habitats. However, in the absence of good habitat monitoring data for many types of species, reliance has been placed on identifying habitats seeing marked changes in biodiversity through combining trends in their associated species into a habitat level metric. Several data sources on species occupancy, abundance within different habitats, and habitat area for two examp...
The contribution of geographically common and rare species to the spatial distribution of biodiversityNARA Subscribed
Motivation and aim Mapping the spatial distribution of biodiversity is critical for understanding its fundamental drivers (e.g. speciation, environmental filtering) as well as for conservation assessment. An important dimension of this topic is how the distributions of subsets of species contribute to the overall distribution of biodiversity. Although studies have previously investigated the role of geographically common and r...
Increased grazing drives homogenisation but reduced grazing increases turnover in upland habitat mosaicsNARA Subscribed
Many ecosystems are grazed by livestock or large, wild herbivores and exist as mosaics of different vegetation communities. Changing grazing could have an impact on heterogeneity as well as on composition. A long-term, large-scale grazing experiment that maintained existing low-intensity sheep grazing, tripled it, removed it and partially substituted sheep grazing by cattle grazing was set up on a mosaic of upland vegetation t...
Buffering effects of soil seed banks on plant community composition in response to land use and climateNARA Subscribed
Aim Climate and land use are key determinants of biodiversity, with past and ongoing changes posing serious threats to global ecosystems. Unlike most other organism groups, plant species can possess dormant life‐history stages such as soil seed banks, which may help plant communities to resist or at least postpone the detrimental impact of global changes. This study investigates the potential for soil seed banks to achieve thi...
TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open accessNARA Subscribed
Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodivers...
Plant variation in nutrient concentrations encompasses two major axes. The first is connected to nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), reflects growth rate and has been designated as the leaf economics spectrum ( LES ) while the second follows the gradient in calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) and mirrors cell structural differences. Here, we tested in grasslands whether the sum Ca + Mg concentrations is a better indicator of digestib...
Species composition of coastal dune vegetation in Scotland has proved resistant to climate change over a third of a centuryNARA Subscribed
Climate change is expected to have an impact on plant communities as increased temperatures are expected to drive individual species' distributions polewards. The results of a revisitation study after c. 34 years of 89 coastal sites in Scotland, UK, were examined to assess the degree of shifts in species composition that could be accounted for by climate change. There was little evidence for either species retreat northwards o...
Combination of herbivore removal and nitrogen deposition increases upland carbon storageNARA Subscribed
Ecosystem carbon (C) accrual and storage can be enhanced by removing large herbivores as well as by the fertilizing effect of atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition. These drivers are unlikely to operate independently, yet their combined effect on aboveground and belowground C storage remains largely unexplored. We sampled inside and outside 19 upland grazing exclosures, established for up to 80 years, across an N deposition grad...
Drivers of carabid functional diversity: abiotic environment, plant functional traits, or plant functional diversity?NARA Subscribed
Understanding how community assembly is controlled by the balance of abiotic drivers (environment or management) and biotic drivers (community composition of other groups) is important in predicting the response of ecosystems to environmental change. If there are strong links between plant assemblage structure and carabid beetle functional traits and functional diversity, then it is possible to predict the impact of environmen...
Edaphic factors influence the longevity of seeds in the soilNARA Subscribed