Despite increasing research on warming and biodiversity, knowledge on how temperature shapes community size structure remains limited, which is one of the main challenges in assessing the consequences of climate change. This gap is evident in vulnerable ecosystems like ponds, crucial for aquatic biodiversity but highly sensitive to temperature increases due to their small size. This study assessed the main climatic and local d...

Climate change alters habitat conditions, reshapes species distributions, and intensifies extinction risks across terrestrial, marine, and freshwater ecosystems. Freshwater systems in arid and semi-arid regions are particularly vulnerable to climate change due to their sensitivity to hydrological variability and the limited dispersal abilities of aquatic species. However, assessing these impacts is often challenged by data sca...

This study investigates how pondscapes, networks of ponds, and their surrounding environments contribute to supporting identities across diverse cultural contexts. Supporting identities is a non-material Nature’s Contribution to People referring to people’s sense of place, belonging and connection to nature. We draw on data on landscape features from 17 pondscapes across eight countries in Europe and South America, along with...

Body size is a fundamental trait influencing ecological functions, trophic dynamics, and organismal fitness across ecosystems. However, the environmental drivers shaping body size patterns in pond ecosystems across broad spatial scales remain poorly defined. In this study, we assessed the main determinants of body size in cladocerans and copepods, key crustacean zooplankton groups, across 168 ponds including regions in Europe,...

Water permanence is a key factor structuring macroinvertebrate communities in freshwater ecosystems. Previous work often assessed water permanence effects on overall macroinvertebrate community, masking potential differences in group-specific response. The present study investigates the local taxonomic richness and community composition of aquatic Coleoptera, Odonata and Gastropoda using empirical data from a set of permanent...

Eutrophication is a pervasive threat to freshwater ecosystems, and while the implementation of vegetated terrestrial buffer strips is increasingly promoted as a measure to reduce nutrient runoff into riverine systems, little is known on their effectiveness in protecting ponds in agricultural landscapes. We investigated the effect of buffer strip width on pond nutrient concentrations (TN, TP), the concentration of total suspend...

Ponds are key freshwater habitats supporting biodiversity and ecosystem services, yet they remain understudied in the context of land use and climate change. We examined 240 ponds across eight countries (seven in Europe and Uruguay) to assess how internal pond characteristics, surrounding land cover and livestock intensity, seasonal climatic variation, and climate influence nutrient concentrations across spatial and temporal s...

According to differences in life history and species niches, community assembly processes are predicted to differ between common and rare species. While neutral processes, in particular dispersal, should contribute strongly to assembly of rare species, environmental filtering (species sorting) should dominate the community assembly of common species. We analysed commonness and rarity by occurrence, abundance and geographic ran...

Body size is a key trait in ecology due to its influence on metabolism and many other life‐history traits that affect population and community responses to environmental variation as well as ecosystem properties. The size spectrum represents the relationship between abundance (or biomass) and body size, independent of species identity. Size spectrum parameters, such as the slope or intercept, have been applied extensively as i...

Intraspecific morphological variation may reflect phenotypic plasticity or adaptive divergence. While adaptive shape divergence may occur more likely among isolated populations with reduced gene flow, phenotypic plasticity may reflect morphological responses to heterogeneous environments, even in spatially connected populations. We evaluated both processes while examining morphological variations among seven wild populations o...

Trophic transfer efficiency (TTE) is usually calculated as the ratio of production rates between two consecutive trophic levels. Although seemingly simple, TTE estimates from lakes are rare. In our review, we explore the processes and structures that must be understood for a proper lake TTE estimate. We briefly discuss measurements of production rates and trophic positions and mention how ecological efficiencies, nutrients (N,...

Aim We tested whether there is a strong effect of species interactions on assembly of local lake fish communities, in addition to environmental filters and dispersal. Location Seven hundred and seventy‐two European lakes and reservoirs. Time period 1993–2012. Major taxa studied Nineteen species of freshwater fishes. Methods We applied a latent variable approach using Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (R package “BOR...

Trophic interactions in the pelagic area of lakes and the opposing effects of fish feeding (top-down) and phytoplankton biomass (bottom-up) on zooplankton communities are central topics in limnology. We hypothesized that zooplankton size distributions should be a more sensitive approach to disentangle top-down and bottom-up effects than the commonly measured zooplankton biomass. We examined zooplankton size distributions from...

Monitoring the qualitative status of freshwaters is an important goal of the international community, as stated in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) indicator 6.3.2 on good ambient water quality. Monitoring data are, however, lacking in many countries, allegedly because of capacity challenges of less-developed countries. So far, however, the relationship between human development and capacity challenges for water quality...

Fish community feeding and production rates may differ between lakes despite similar fish biomass levels because of differences in size structure and local temperature. Therefore, across‐lake comparisons of the strength and direction of top‐down and bottom‐up fish–phytoplankton relationships should consider these factors. We used the metabolic theory of ecology to calculate size‐ and temperature‐corrected community energy dema...

Understanding drivers of freshwater fish assemblages is critically important for biodiversity conservation strategies, especially in rapidly developing countries, which often have environmental protections lagging behind economic development. The influences of natural and human factors in structuring fish assemblages and their relative contributions are likely to change given the increasing magnitude of human activities. To di...

The density of organisms declines with size, because larger organisms need more energy than smaller ones and energetic losses occur when larger organisms feed on smaller ones. A potential expression of density‐size distributions are Normalized Biomass Size Spectra (NBSS), which plot the logarithm of biomass independent of taxonomy within bins of logarithmic organismal size, divided by the bin width. Theoretically, the NBSS slo...