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...
Forests are vital for outdoor recreation, benefiting mental, physical, and social well-being. While the importance of forest structure in supporting biodiversity and material ecosystem functions is well-documented, research on its relationship with non-material contributions to people remains limited, and there is a lack of robust indicators for this relationship. Our study addresses this gap...
Dry grasslands are vulnerable to climate and land use change. Increasing temperatures, drought, grazing cessation or nitrogen deposition result in shifts in taxonomic and functional composition. We resurveyed vegetation plots of dry grasslands after three decades and tested the hypotheses that species richness and diversity decreased both at the scale of the species pool and single...
Repeated observations are crucial for understanding trends in biodiversity changes, particularly shifts in species composition. However, next to biodiversity, changes in environmental drivers are of equal importance to understand these. As most monitoring projects only recently started, archival data offer invaluable insights into long-term ecosystem dynamics and environmental changes,...
Urban living conditions pose a threat to human health and wellbeing, confronting people of all ages with harmful influences like air or noise pollution.
This study analyzes the impact of nature experience on four human health outcomes. Longitudinal data was obtained through the deep-phenotyping LIFE Adult study from Leipzig, Germany. Inclusion criteria entailed completeness of datasets and a...
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...
The contribution of urban nature to human well-being is well documented, providing benefits such as improved air quality, increased physical activity, enhanced social cohesion, stress reduction and diverse recreational opportunities. These green areas play a crucial role in promoting physical activity and facilitating social interactions. The economic valuation of these natural amenities is...
Human activities have altered the composition of biotas worldwide by introducing non-native species, breaking down biogeographical boundaries. Using global distribution data of 279,437 native and 11,589 non-native seed plant species, we analyzed the impact of species introductions on natural biogeographic boundaries based on taxonomic and phylogenetic compositions of 548 regions. We found that...
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...
To determine the winner and loser species of biodiversity change, systematic monitoring data are needed that cover all habitat types, extend into the last century, and are geographically representative. However, such data are lacking, but species trends might be obtained from so far untapped data. Here, we make use of plant species occurrences records that were recorded in habitat mapping...
In the face of an escalating biodiversity crisis, it is imperative to concentrate efforts on developing comprehensive strategies in countries with lower economies, where the rich natural heritage is most vulnerable yet crucial for ecological balance. This aligns with the target set in the Convention on Biological Diversityโs (CBD) Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) vision 2050, which calls...
New technologies are enabling scientists to obtain data rapidly and continuously. Examples include camera traps, phenocams, and citizen science apps, among others. These rapidly increasing biodiversity data sets challenge new forms of data access, processing, and documentation.
In response to these challenges, we focus on data cubes as an alternative to efficiently handle species occurrence...
Terrestrial ecosystems acquire carbon via photosynthesis and lose it predominately through soil respiration. These coupled processes occur rhythmically in diel cycles. Global changes that influence carbon loss vs carbon gain alter ecosystem carbon storage capacity. Yet, the mechanisms underlying the influence of some global change drivers on ecosystem processes remain undocumented. We test how...
Active restoration accelerates the colonization and succession of vegetation communities by using manual methods to introduce plant propagules into a degraded area. To meet the demands for large landscape revegetation, active restoration restricts land practitioners to use plants that are produced by seed suppliers at commercial scales (the โRestoration species poolโ). Plants from the...
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,...
Current static mapping approaches of ecosystem conditions are inadequate, given the fast pace of ecosystem transformations under the climate change regime. Our project โTime-varying AI-based mapping of ecosystem conditions and extents using multi-source Earth observation data cubesโ, TEE Cube, aims to bridge this gap by developing a dynamic approach for mapping ecosystem conditions. The study...
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...
Freshwater ecosystems have been heavily impacted by land-use changes, but syntheses on the impacts on freshwater ecosystems are still limited. First, we compiled a global database encompassing 242 studies and 4,653 sites with species abundance data (from multiple taxon groups and geographic locations) across sites with different land-use categories. This database is now the largest database to...
How can we meet economic objectives of timber harvesting while maintaining the functioning of diverse forest ecosystems? Existing forest models that address this type of question are often complex, data-intensive, challenging to couple with economic optimization models, or can not easily be generalised for uneven-aged mixed-species forests. Here, we develop an ecological-economic optimization...
In plant communities, species often donยดt 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 (Ejrnรฆs, Bruun and Graae, 2006; Kรถrner et al.,...
The future Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (post-2027) is currently under discussion, with the EU Commission set to unveil its proposal in July 2025. Thus, the upcoming CAP will be shaped by a new EU administration, following the EU elections in June this year. The hope is that the next CAP should fulfill, inter alia, ambitious EU sustainability targets defined in the Green Deal, Farm-to-Fork...
The decline in biodiversity in conjunction with global change poses a threat to human well-being. Soils are home to c. 60 % of species on earth but our knowledge of soil biodiversity change and its drivers is limited. Long-term monitoring data are needed but are scarce or have not yet been analyzed. Here, we present analyses of over 30 years of soil biodiversity monitoring in Germany.
In c....
The European Union has set an ambitious target to tackle climate change: achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. To achieve this target, it is essential that the EU focuses on increasing carbon storage in our soils and forests. According to most experts, the implementation of nature-based solutions (NbS) is crucial to tackling the climate crisis. Rewilding is a type of NbS that aims to...
Recent studies have reported widespread declines in terrestrial insect abundance, but trends in other biodiversity metrics are less clear-cut. We examined long-term trends in 923 terrestrial insect assemblages monitored in 106 studies, and found concomitant declines in abundance and species richness. For studies that were resolved to species level (551 sites in 57 studies), we observed a...
The environmental impacts of modern agriculture are a grave concern. Although policies such as the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) attempt to mitigate further damage to ecosystems, plant and animal species in agricultural landscapes continue to decline at alarming rates.
A major challenge in designing effective agricultural policies is that these must take multiple economic,...
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....
The widely observed positive relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning is thought to be driven by complementary resource use of plant species. Biotic interactions among plants and between plants and soil organisms are suggested to drive key aspects of resource-use complementarity. The young tree diversity experiment MyDiv aims to integrate biotic interactions across guilds...
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...
- In the last years, biodiversity experiments showed how varying plant species diversity and its associated changes in abiotic and biotic environment produce phenotypic changes in plant species. However, it is still not clear what is the role of adaptation and phenotypic plasticity in shaping these phenotypic responses, and whether the environmental heterogeneity typical of highly diverse...
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...
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...
Production forests are managed to optimize timber production, resulting in even-aged stands with few canopy gaps and little deadwood. This biotic homogenization can lead to loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions with far-reaching consequences for human well-being. To explore strategies for promoting biodiversity and ecosystem functioning while maintaining timber production, the BETA-FOR...
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....
Chemical pollution is a major driver of biodiversity loss and is projected to triple in the next 3 decades. Traditionally, laboratory measures of toxin sensitivity have been extended to quantify the contribution of chemical pollution to biodiversity loss. However, this approach ignores important biotic interactions and therefore performs poorly when predicting extinctions in nature. To solve...
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 โgenericโ 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...
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...
Disturbances alter the diversity and composition of microbial communities. Yet a generalized empirical assessment of microbiome responses to disturbance across different environments is needed to understand the factors driving microbiome recovery, and the role of the environment in driving these patterns. To this end, we combined null models with Bayesian generalized linear models to examine...
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...
Plant secondary (specialized) metabolites play an important role for ecological interaction of organism and responses to environmental factors. Up to now, comprehensive studies of the complex metabolome of whole plant communities are lacking. Little is known with respect to the most abundant plant secondary metabolites, habitat specific metabolite groups and their function, and correlation...
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...
Ever-growing human population and nutritional demands, supply chain disruptions, and advancing climate change have led to the realization that changes in diversity and system performance are intimately linked. Moreover, diversity and system performance depend on heterogeneity. Mitigating changes in system performance and promoting sustainable living conditions requires transformative...
Increasing nutrient input may have detrimental effects on the biodiversity and ecosystem functioning of grassland ecosystems. However, which mechanisms affect nutrient pools and concentrations at the community level is not always apparent, as an increase in nutrient availability is not necessarily reflected in an increase in biomass and diverse communities often consist of morphologically and...
Many organisms rely on vibration detection to communicate, navigate, find food, and reproduce. However, the presence of human-made, or anthropogenic, noise through moving machine parts and silence by human-made solid structures, raises concerns about its impact on their locomotion patterns, metabolism, social interaction, development, distribution, food web, and thus resource turnover and...
Competition for shared resources has been shown to support species coexistence given trade-offs between resource consumption and resource supply. However, the number of coexisting species cannot exceed the number of resources when the latter do not vary over time. Allowing for resource fluctuations overcomes this competitive exclusion limitation and two species can coexist on a single...
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...
Scholars increasingly point out that the multiple current crises build up toward a global polycrisis. Yet what exactly are its components? How are crises interlinked, and what are its ultimate drivers? A systematic mapping of the polycrisis seems essential for finding a way out. Based on the literature and iterative discussions we identified eight global crises: climate change; biodiversity...
Climate change is a major challenge for biodiversity as well as sustainable fisheries management. Scientific advice needs to take modifications in stock productivity into account to safeguard healthy stocks, and to secure viable fisheries, which provide economic and social benefits. We include temperature-dependent stock-recruitment relationships into an ecological-economic multispecies...
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...
Biodiversity of the world flora is shaped by evolutionary radiations. Radiations are influenced by the interplay between functional trait flexibility (evolvability of traits over macroevolutionary times) and genomic factors. However, this has never been tested in a quantitative macroevolutionary framework. Using ca. 2,600 species of palms (Arecaceae) as a model system, we test the hypothesis...
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) โ a large field experiment in Bad Lauchstรคdt (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...
The largest animals in ecosystems (megafauna) can feed on mega-fruited plants (fruits diameter > 4 cm) and disperse massive loads of large seeds across long distances, thus playing a vital role in maintaining biotic connectivity and population structures of mega-fruited plants. However, it remains unclear how the global extinction of most megafauna since the late Quaternary (last ~10k years)...
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...
Rewilding has become an established concept of restoring natural processes, while enhancing biodiversity potential of the landscape. Rewilding creates resilient, self-regulating and self-sustaining ecosystems, while promoting human-wellbeing. The Oder delta is one such landscape chosen for rewilding. It is located at the Baltic coast between Poland and Germany, where the complex ecosystems...
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...
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...
The latitudinal gradient in biodiversity is a long-observed phenomenon, where many components of global biodiversity, including species richness, phylogenetic diversity, and functional diversity, decrease from the Equator to the Poles. Though nuclear genetic diversity is an important component of biodiversity that underlies speciesโ adaptive potential, whether it also varies latitudinally with...
Unsustainable use of ecosystems has led to the degradation of biodiversity and ecosystem services including reduced carbon sequestration, reduced pollination, and an increase in natural disasters. Widespread restoration of these ecosystems is crucial to address the biodiversity and climate crisis. Rewilding is a form of restoration aiming at improving the condition of ecosystems by recovering...
Plants, like many other organisms, produce a tremendous variety of secondary compounds that are crucial to interspecific and intraspecific interactions, as well as to adaptation to environmental changes. This chemical diversity has been attributed to multiple factors such as function (e.g. defense, pollinator attraction), tissue-specific needs, various constraints, and phylogenetic history....
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,...
In many regions worldwide, forests suffer from climate change-induced droughts. The โhotter droughtโ 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 2018โ2020 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...
There's somethin' bout the way
The street looks when it's just rained
There's a glow off the pavement
You walk me to the car
And you know I wanna ask you to dance right there
In the middle of the parking lot
Yeah
Oh, yeah
We're drivin' down the road
I wonder if you know
I'm tryin' so hard not to get caught up now
But you're just so cool
Run your hands through your hair
Absent...
