Plant‐parasitic nematodes cause devastating agricultural damage worldwide. Only a few synthetic nematicides can be used and their application is limited in fields. Therefore, there is a need for sustainable and environment‐friendly alternatives. Nematode‐trapping fungi (NTF) are natural predators of nematodes. They capture and digest them with their hyphae and are starting to being used as bio‐control agents. In this study, we...

Soil respiration is an important pathway of soil organic carbon losses in temperate grasslands; however, it is rarely studied across broad management intensity gradients in a landscape. Using the soda-lime method, we measured in-situ soil CO 2 efflux with single measurements of long exposure time (i.e. 3 day long) in 150 grasslands in three German regions in early summer 2018 and 2019. The grasslands ranged from unfertilized a...

Grassland management intensity influences nutrient cycling both directly, by changing nutrient inputs and outputs from the ecosystem, and indirectly, by altering the nutrient content, and the diversity and functional composition of plant and microbial communities. However, the relative importance of these direct and indirect processes for the leaching of multiple nutrients is poorly studied. We measured the annual leaching of...

Nematode-trapping fungi, such as Duddingtonia flagrans , are fascinating carnivorous microorganisms. In a nutrient-rich environment they live as saprotrophs, but if nutrients are scarce and in the presence of nematodes, they can switch to a predatory lifestyle. The switch is characterized by the formation of complex, adhesive trap structures. The interaction requires a sophisticated interspecies communication with pheromones,...

The production of piscine viruses, in particular of koi herpesvirus (KHV, CyHV‐3) and infectious salmon anaemia virus (ISAV), is still challenging due to the limited susceptibility of available cell lines to these viruses. A number of cell lines from different fish species were compared to standard diagnostic cell lines for KHV and ISAV regarding their capability to exhibit a cytopathic effect (CPE) and to accumulate virus. Tw...

The intensification of land use constitutes one of the main drivers of global change and alters nutrient fluxes on all spatial scales, causing landscape‐level eutrophication and contamination of natural resources. Changes in soil nutrient concentrations are thus indicative for crucial environmental issues associated with intensive land use. We measured concentrations of NO 3 –N, NH 4 –N, P, K, Mg, and Ca using 1,326 ion‐exchan...

Global change, especially land‐use intensification, affects human well‐being by impacting the delivery of multiple ecosystem services (multifunctionality). However, whether biodiversity loss is a major component of global change effects on multifunctionality in real‐world ecosystems, as in experimental ones, remains unclear. Therefore, we assessed biodiversity, functional composition and 14 ecosystem services on 150 agricultur...

Land‐use intensification is a key driver of biodiversity change. However, little is known about how it alters relationships between the diversities of different taxonomic groups, which are often correlated due to shared environmental drivers and trophic interactions. Using data from 150 grassland sites, we examined how land‐use intensification (increased fertilization, higher livestock densities, and increased mowing frequency...