Metabolomics data is rich and often large, containing far more variables than samples while many features remain unannotated. Therefore, the analysis of metabolomics data is not trivial and calls for approaches complementary to (multivariate) statisticial analyses not only to overcome the metabolite annotation bottleneck, but more importantly, to facilitate the rapid exploration of the...
Forests with a high overall biodiversity provide a variety of ecosystem functions and service and are associated with greater ecosystem stability and resilience to disturbance events. To identify and preserve intact forest ecosystems across the country, monitoring forest biodiversity on national scale is essential. Large-scale remote sensing datasets offer the potential to develop novel...
The [Forest Condition Monitor project][1] of the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) aims at making information about national scale forest condition accessible to stakeholders, policy makers and scientists. One of its main components is an area-wide estimation of forest condition anomalies from satellite-based land-surface reflectance measurements. Reflectance patterns differ...
Introduction of large amounts of seeds is essential for restoration of temperate grasslands and is often regulated by seed transfer zones. These zones are often derived from abiotic parameters only. In order to evaluate seed zones as a means for the protection of genetic diversity and to avoid potential detrimental effects such as maladaptation and homogenisation of seed transfer within zones,...
The Europa Biodiversity Observation Network ([EuropaBON][1]) includes one of the largest and most influential biodiversity communities in Europe. The aim of this impressive network of stakeholders is to co-design a seamless European biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring system that integrates existing biodiversity data and fills remaining data gaps. Network members are included in each step of...
Climate and land-use change are key drivers of global change. Full-factorial field experiments in which both drivers are manipulated are essential to understand and predict their potentially interactive effects on the structure and functioning of grassland ecosystems. Here, we present eight years of data on grassland dynamics from the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF) in Central...
The plant community composition and species phenology are important indicators of environmental changes and subject to numerous ecological studies. In most previous studies, data on plant communities was collected by hand, making the data collection process laborious, time-intensive and subject to human error and subjectiveness. Additionally, the amount of work required for this process...
‘What is a species?’ is a fundamental question in biology influencing many aspects of integrated biodiversity research. The biological species concept, long considered as the golden standard, defines species as reproductively isolated populations in which there is no gene flow and whose genomes diverge due to selection and genetic drift. However, species constantly interact through gene flow,...
By offering various benefits, natural amenities play a significant role in enhancing the well-being of urban citizens whose city life is often associated with hecticness and stress. Urban green spaces serve citizens with recreational opportunities, aesthetic enjoyment, contribute to public health, climate regulations, cooling effect, and have an impact on the attractiveness of neighborhoods...
Remote sensing is frequently used to assess biodiversity, particularly species and functional diversity. Common approaches rely on the spectral diversity of plant canopies. Spectral diversity, however, exhibits temporal dynamics that remain inadequately understood. We investigated these dynamics in a nutrient-rich floodplain meadow in northern Germany, characterized by dense grassland...
Background: Noncommunicable diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease (CVD), account for a large proportion of the global burden of disease. Certain characteristics of biodiverse green spaces such as walkability have been argued to enhance physical health outcomes such as cardiovascular health by increasing the likelihood and intensity of physical activity (PA). However, existing...
Seeds host highly diverse microbial communities, which colonize the surface but also the internal tissues of the seeds (i.e., seed epiphytes and endophytes). For decades, seed endophytes have gone unnoticed, but recent studies indicate that these microorganisms can have a major influence on the development and health of seedlings. Most of these endophytes seem to be plant-beneficial bacteria...
Arthropods comprise 75% of the earth’s living organisms. At the same time, only 10% of all conservation actions target arthropods — a mismatch that poses a significant threat to global biodiversity. Increasing urbanization in the world reduces nature experiences for city dwellers, effectively alienating people from nature. Urban environments provide few habitats for most insect species. The...
The temperature increase predicted for the end of the 21st century will affect the distribution of biodiversity worldwide and impact natural resources and the availability of ecosystem services. Given the dependence of humans on certain species and the severity of environmental change, the effects may vary from region to region. The availability of timber is directly linked to the natural...
Terrestrial biodiversity drives ecosystem functions that regulate land-atmosphere interactions. Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) relationships are critical for ecosystem stability and resilience. While current BEF knowledge stems from relatively small-scale experiments, in-situ data, and theoretical work, Earth Observation (EO) data offer ample opportunities for global vegetation...
Freshwater streams are affected by pesticide and nutrient inputs and severe alterations of the natural water course and riparian vegetation. The goal of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) to achieve a ‘good ecological status’ for all surface waters by 2015 has been missed in a large part of German rivers and streams.
In the BMBF-funded citizen science project FLOW, over 900...
Orthopterans, encompassing crickets, bush-crickets, and grasshoppers, are key invertebrate herbivores notable for their genome size (GS) variation and reproductive diversity (RD). Over evolutionary timescales, orthopterans show large-scale chromosome rearrangements. The persistence chromosomal polymorphisms, such as B chromosomes and sex chromosomes in certain lineages but not others, warrants...
Mongolia, like everywhere else in the world, is currently confronted by the effects of global change. These predominately include increasing average winter temperatures, decrease in winter and spring precipitation and a change in land-use due to increased grazing pressure. Little is yet known about the long-term effects of these developments on plant phenology, species composition and plant...
Heterotrophic protists occupy key nodes in terrestrial food webs due to their high abundance, fast turnover and functional importance as microbial grazers. However, their impact on groundwater bacterial communities and organic carbon transfer to higher trophic levels remains largely unknown. Assessing their role in trophic interactions using molecular techniques has been limited by the...
Global biodiversity loss threatens a multitude of ecosystem functions. However, not only the diversity of communities drives their functioning, but also the identity and abundance of their members. While arthropods are key indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning declines – e.g. the transfer of energy; often studied through their biomass – it remains unexplored whether such...
In the proposed paper, we present the research that was conducted within the framework of the PRO-Coast project, initiated in November 2023 with funding from Horizon Europe. The study aims to uncover the complex societal drivers of biodiversity loss in coastal ecosystems through an in-depth, multi-level analytical framework. This framework examines demographic, social, ethnic, religious,...
Soil biogeochemical cycles are regulated by soil food webs. However, variations in soil food web structure and functioning across major environmental gradients remain largely unknown, hampering generalisations of links between soil fauna and biogeochemistry. Here, I summarise our several recent projects applying energy flux approach to explore successional development of soil animal food webs...
Rewilding has emerged as a restoration approach that addresses societal challenges and promotes the benefits of nature restoration. It aims to restore wildlife, mitigate climate change, and create transformative change. However, scaling up rewilding efforts is challenging due to complex nature-people relationships. Effective landscape management and stakeholder engagement are crucial for...
Urban development can affect population dynamics, ecological interactions and fitness, challenging the persistence of many species, including Hymenoptera. Yet, how and which urban environmental features affect Hymenoptera abundance and species richness, as well as fitness, remain unclear. Here, we used a citizen science approach and cavity-nesting Hymenoptera in insect hotels as a model system...
Current static mapping approaches of ecosystem conditions are inadequate, given the fast pace of ecosystem transformations under the climate change regime. Our project “Time-varying AI-based mapping of ecosystem conditions and extents using multi-source Earth observation data cubes”, TEE Cube, aims to bridge this gap by developing a dynamic approach for mapping ecosystem conditions. The study...
In plant communities, species often don´t arrive simultaneously at a new site. The effect of an early-arriving species (EAS) on the establishment, growth and reproduction of a late-arriving species (LAS) is referred to as priority effect. Despite increasing evidence that priority effects play an important role in community assembly processes (Ejrnæs, Bruun and Graae, 2006; Körner et al.,...
Over half of all species on Earth live in soil. However, human activities threaten the essential soil ecosystem functions that these species provide. Despite this, soils are often overlooked in school curricula. This citizen science project introduces students to the vital role of soils through an engaging, hands-on learning experience, aiming to quantify the extent to which human activities...
In soil microbiomes, the interplay between dispersal, biotic, and abiotic selection is scale-dependent, but the impact of sampling design on biodiversity estimates is often overlooked. To address this, we studied the effects of spatial sampling designs, including commonly-practiced homogenization (or sample pooling), on microbial diversity estimates by sampling soil microbiomes at 54 sites...
Preserving farmland biodiversity is one of the objectives of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union.
To achieve this goal, it is important to restore landscape connectivity by enriching agricultural landscapes again with accessible habitats for breeding, feeding, and shelter. In intensive agricultural regions of Germany, adding more hedges would be highly beneficial for...
Human induced climate change poses a threat to global biodiversity. Broad scale effects of climate change are often assessed on the basis of long-term changes in climatic conditions. However, the effect of increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (EWE) due to climate change on biodiversity remains unclear. We introduce a general framework to investigate the effects of EWE...
Given that food and shelter are basic human needs, it is not surprising that much scientific focus goes into understanding and modelling plant production systems for nutrition and industrial needs. It is crucial to understand where and when specific crops are most suitable to grow now and in the (near-term) future under risk scenarios.
Agricultural land suitability assessment models are...
Interactions of human societies with the climate system and ecosystems in the biosphere caused the twin-crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss. In this paper we contribute to addressing the challenge of evaluating socially optimal climate policy in a world with atmosphere-biosphere interactions by combining the work of two influential economists: Partha Dasgupta and Bill Nordhaus....
There is growing evidence of a worldwide insect decline, caused by various pressures such as natural habitat loss, chemicals, or warming temperatures. However, not all insects are impacted in the same way, and long-term monitoring coupled with a trait approach can be a powerful tool for understanding the drivers and consequences of these environmental changes. Here, we use data from two...
Global change is altering above-belowground multitrophic communities, and this has consequences for ecosystem processes and multifunctionality. The ecosystem-wide effects of such changes depend on the joint interplay of various taxa and their ecological interactions. Our aim is to investigate how above-belowground multifunctionality, multitrophic interaction networks, and energy fluxes respond...
Landscape alteration, agricultural intensification and climate change are considered the most important global change factors driving wild bee decline. However, little is known about whether these drivers have led to changes in the life-history traits of bees. Body size is one of the most fundamental life-history traits, with pervasive effects on individual fitness, population dynamics and the...
Urbanisation is one of the main drivers of land-use change with overall negative effects on biodiversity. Yet, insect pollinator communities have been shown to have contrasting responses to urbanisation with varying effects on their species richness and abundance. Here, we used a multiple spatial scale (local to landscape scale) within-city approach to investigate the overall impact of urban...
Plant macrophenology studies large-scale patterns and processes in the timing of plant life cycle events, such as flowering, leaf-out, and fruiting, across extensive spatial and temporal scales. This field aims to understand how climate and environmental changes influence these phenological events. As climate change continues to impact ecosystems globally, understanding these patterns is...
The pantropically distributed mahogany family (Meliaceae Juss.) is globally valued for its timber and other socio-economically and culturally important products (e.g., in medicine). Despite this recognition, members of the family are threatened by habitat destruction (deforestation). The implementation of long-term conservation measures is hindered by taxonomic uncertainties and inadequate...
Agricultural fields are a habitat type which can exhibit a high amount of biodiversity depending on the management intensity. They have come under increasing pressure due to the intensification of management practices like pesticide application or fertilization. While it is understood that intensification has a negative effect on the biodiversity of this habitat, it is not clear how the...
International commitments promote large-scale forest restoration as a nature-based solution to mitigate climate change through carbon (C) sequestration. Accumulating evidence suggests that mixed compared to monospecific planted forests may store more C, exhibit greater stability to climate extremes, and provide a wider range of ecosystem services. However, experimental studies that thoroughly...
Survival of wild bees is threatened by multiple factors such as agricultural intensification, scarcity of food resources and diseases. Many pathogens are shared between managed and wild bee species, with flowers as the most likely route of interspecific transmission. An increased density of managed pollinators in the landscape may therefore aggravate pathogen spillover among communities of...
Predation is a major ecological force, but its effect on bees has rarely been studied. Here, we investigated whether the presence of a major bee predator in Germany, the European bee-eater (Merops apiaster), decreases the abundance and body size, which is potentially related to predation risk, of three common bumblebee species (Bombus lapidarius, Bombus terrestris and Bombus pascuorum)...
Trait-based ecology assumes that functional traits help to understand how organisms influence ecosystem processes. The focus has classically been on trait differences between species, but, as the range of variation within species (intraspecific and intraindividual trait variability) is highly plastic, it may be more likely to respond to species richness in communities to mediate coexistence....
Habitat fragmentation is one of the major threats to European ecosystems. It often leads to decreased patch area and increased isolation of populations. Both processes are expected to result in genetic impoverishment and reduced resilience to environmental changes in populations inhabiting fragmented landscapes. In particular, semi-natural grasslands, which represent one of the most...
Fruit scent plays a significant role in attracting animals, providing information on fruit ripeness, facilitating fruit selection and eventually contributing significantly to seed dispersal. Chemical signaling is often based on “generic” plant volatile organic compounds. But there is a significant exception: aliphatic esters. These compounds are prominent primarily in ripe fruits and mainly in...
The conservation of endangered species is crucial to prevent the loss of biodiversity. Genetic studies provide essential insights into population structure and dynamics and help to investigate the cause of genetic diversity loss, which are vital for effective conservation strategies of those species. Our study investigates the genetic diversity changes in the endangered perennial species...
Plants produce specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to protect themselves against biotic and abiotic stresses. When herbivores damage plant tissues, plants release signals, which attract natural enemies of the herbivores and inform neighboring plants about a possible attack. Intensity of plant-herbivore interactions and plant diversity could shape VOC emissions resulting in the...
The reproduction of most crops and wild plant species depends on interactions with animal pollinators, which are declining globally due to climate change and human activities. Understanding changes in pollinator populations and plant-pollinator interactions is crucial for predicting and mitigating biodiversity loss. Traditional methods for collecting these data are time-consuming, costly, and...
Manual microscopic analyses are traditionally the gold standard for various palynological applications. However, the recent trend is towards automated, database-driven pollen analyses that are expected to be cheaper, less time-consuming and allow better reproducibility than traditional microscope-based methods. One such innovative approach is multispectral imaging flow cytometry combined with...
Bees vary greatly in their dietary span, ranging from highly specialized species that collect floral rewards (e.g., pollen, nectar, or oil) from very few plant taxa to generalists that utilize a variety of floral hosts. Such diet specialization is hypothesized to constrain both the abundance and distribution of a species, with specialist species having lower abundance and smaller distribution...
Genetic diversity is an important level of biodiversity whose protection is essential in the face
of climate change. It is therefore necessary to understand how genetic diversity can be most
effectively protected and what causes it. The aim of this study is to determine which of the 23
anthropogenic and environmental variables has the greatest influence on the genetic diversity
of...
Groundwater-dependent vegetation (GDV) forms globally important biodiversity hotspots, which are threatened by climate and land-use change and require large-scale mapping efforts for their protection. Phreatophyte species are relevant local ecohydrological indicators of groundwater. However, there exists no approach to move from species to plot level to the final large-scale mapping of GDV. A...
Contemporary evolution is a common occurrence where plant species colonize non-native ranges and encounter novel interaction partners. However, our understanding of contemporary evolution is limited because most native vs. non-native range comparisons overlook within-range variation among populations and lack interdisciplinary frameworks utilizing multi-omics approaches. The integrative...
Recent recurrent drought years have imposed water and heat stress on trees across Germany. However, it is unclear how demographic rates of broadleaved tree species were affected by the drought. Moreover, it is likely that climate change leads to an increasing frequency of drought years and associated changes of demographic rates, and it is unclear whether current forests will still be viable...
Intraspecific phytochemical diversity (‘chemodiversity’) affects plant-environment interactions. However, the ecological mechanisms maintaining chemodiversity remain largely unknown. Here, the effects of steroidal glycoside (SG) chemodiversity and chemotype on plant performance, seed progeny, herbivory and buzz-pollination were assessed. Plot-level SG chemodiversity was manipulated using a...
Plant functional diversity is a crucial property for ecosystem dynamics and buffering extreme events. Metrics for plant functional diversity are usually computed using a set of plant functional traits and corresponding species. Due to the scarcity of field data, functional diversity estimates are frequently only available for single points in time.
However, seasonal dynamics during the...
Our forests are challenged by a suite of stressors associated with climate change, such as extended droughts, heatwaves, ‘false springs’ increasing late-frost risk, storms, heavy rainfall events, and novel pathogens. Our iDiv platform ARBOfun, established in 2012 in Großpösna, was designed to study the responses (e.g., resistance, resilience) to these stressors of individual trees of close to...
sPlot (v4.0) is the most comprehensive vegetation database in the world containing more than 2.5 million plot observations and 53 million species x observation records from 138 countries. To reduce the geographical distribution bias of the previous versions towards the Global North, we actively worked to promote the integration of researchers from underrepresented areas in this new release....
Eco-metabolomics is an emerging interdisciplinary field that combines ecological and metabolomic methodologies to investigate the biochemical basis of ecological processes and their responses to environmental changes. By examining how environmental factors such as climate, soil conditions, and interspecies interactions influence the metabolic profiles of organisms, eco-metabolomics provides...
Grasslands cover 20-40% of Earth’s land and provide important ecosystem functions. While grassland productivity matters for fodder or bioenergy supply, biodiversity is also relevant, e.g. for stability and for support of animal species, such as pollinators. Hence, the relations between these functions, and their responses to climate and land use change, need to be well understood to promote...
Symbionts are integral to arthropod biology, profoundly shaping their hosts' phenotypic traits and playing a pivotal role in speciation. While these associations can be costly for insect hosts, they are typically stable and maternally transmitted with high fidelity. However, the absence of co-cladogenesis suggests that many symbiont-host relationships are transient over evolutionary...
In Asia, previous studies have shown changes across the Eocene–Oligocene Transition (EOT, a global cooling event; 34 Ma) from perissodactyl-dominated faunas to those dominated by smaller-bodied Glires, better adapted to dry environments with limited resources (the Mongolian Remodelling). However, recent paleoenvironmental records and novel climate models show drying already occurring in...
In many regions worldwide, forests suffer from climate change-induced droughts. The ‘hotter drought’ in Europe in 2018 with the consecutive drought years 2019 and 2020 caused large-scale growth declines and forest dieback. We investigated if tree growth responses to the 2018–2020 drought can be explained by tree functional traits related to drought tolerance, growth, and resource acquisition....
Understanding genetic mechanisms of high throughput data facilitates landscape genomic approaches to infer how dispersal is controlled by adaptive vs. non-adaptive drivers of gene flow. Invasive plant species are suitable study models because non-native populations are often prone to rapid genomic changes as a result of colonizing a novel range. However, many studies on invasive plants...
Habitat loss and fragmentation are interacting phenomena that are appreciated to shape patterns of biodiversity. While this fact is widely acknowledged, it remains difficult to make statements about their effects on biodiversity generally. This may be due in part to the scale dependent approaches that are taken to understand their impact on biodiversity, where some studies focus on patterns...
Plants mediate - through their traits - between the environment and ecosystem functioning. Plants' optical spectra can directly reflect some of these traits. A series of studies have assessed trait estimates or plant-environment relationships from hyperspectral data. Yet these relationships largely differed in biomes, functional aspects, application context, or for different functional groups....
Monitoring the biodiversity of the Amazon forest poses significant challenges due to its remote location and limited data availability. Remote sensing promises an efficient solution, utilizing advanced sensors to identify biodiversity patterns in vegetation across vast areas. The Spectral Variation Hypothesis (SVH) suggests a correlation between spectral heterogeneity and biodiversity, with...
Global changes in biodiversity and their drivers are a major focus of scientific research. Recent studies have shown that taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity can be combined to disentangle the drivers of community assembly. Due to their nature, islands are ideal biological model systems to study the effects of filters on diversity patterns. Although bird community assembly on...
In biodiversity research, synthesizing data from different sources is frequently needed as a prerequisite to answering important questions. Performing these integrations remains a tedious process requiring significant human effort. Often, results of these efforts are not easily reusable for other questions. Knowledge graphs have been proposed as an approach to alleviate this problem in the...
Grasslands, representing the most extensive terrestrial biome, are increasingly subjected to management intensification, particularly in Europe, where they play an essential role in agricultural systems. The ecological and environmental functions of these grasslands are affected by management practices, which vary in intensity according to environmental conditions. While intensified management...
A better understanding of how climate change affects the stability of grassland biomass production is important to ensure future ecosystem functioning. Since 2015, data on grassland biomass production have been collected in the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF) – a large field experiment in Bad Lauchstädt (Saxony-Anhalt, Germany) with different land use types under future and ambient...
The expansion of agricultural land into natural habitats harms global biodiversity, especially when unsustainable practices are employed. In Malaysia, pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) have adapted to this altered environment, regularly entering oil palm plantations adjacent to their remaining forest habitat. Within these plantations, macaques feed on palm fruits and provide an...
Continual fragmentation of terrestrial and freshwater habitats can produce multiple negative impacts to wildlife populations, plant community persistence and overall ecosystem functioning. Preserving connectivity between crucial habitat areas and across large landscapes is vital to sustain biodiversity during ongoing anthropogenic global change. Identifying key ecological corridors at spatial...
Plant-pollinator interactions are important for maintaining diversity and ecosystem services. In recent years, however, mismatches have arisen due to phenological shifts in plants and insects because of climate change. To evaluate these interactions and their future development, it is important to consider not only the beginning and end of flowering but also the course of its intensity (i.e....
Knowing and understanding plant phenology patterns is important for three main reasons. 1. Plant phenology is sensitive to climate change, 2. It influences the dynamics and interaction between species, and 3. It drives essential ecosystem functions. To unravel spatio-temporal patterns in phenology, long-term data covering the spatial distribution of species is necessary. However, typically,...
The obligate intracellular endosymbiont Wolbachia (Alphaproteobacteria) is considered the most abundant symbiont with an estimated 40 % of Arthropod species infected. In most Arthropods, Wolbachia exert negative fitness effects on their host, causing for instance reproductive aberrations which facilitate the symbiont transmission. However, recent genomic analyses have revealed the presence...
Agricultural land abandonment in Southern Europe offers both opportunities for habitat restoration and conservation challenges, including potential human-wildlife conflicts, particularly in regions where extensive farming and free-ranging livestock persist. Livestock can pose threats to wildlife by degrading habitats, competing for resources, and altering habitat use patterns, which may lead...
As pressures on biodiversity continue to escalate, there is an urgent need for a coordinated biodiversity monitoring effort across Europe to track changes in spatial and temporal trends and inform biodiversity policies. To achieve this, it is essential to develop an optimal sampling design that effectively monitors trends in both rare and common habitats and species. This study uses habitat...
Establishing and maintaining protected areas (PAs) is a key action in delivering post-2020 biodiversity targets. PAs often need to meet multiple objectives, ranging from biodiversity protection to ecosystem service provision and climate change mitigation, but available land and conservation funding is limited. Therefore, optimizing resources by selecting the most beneficial PAs is vital. Here,...
