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Background and aims: Plant diversity – ecosystem processes relationships are essential to our understanding of ecosystem functioning. We aimed at disentangling the nature of such relationships in a mesotrophic grassland that was highly heterogeneous with regards to nutrient availability. Methods: Rather than targeting primary productivity, like most existing reports do, we focused our study on bel

Heavy metals are some of the most persistent and potent anthropogenic environmental contaminants. Although heavy metals may compromise microbial communities and soil fertility, it is challenging to causally link microbial responses to heavy metals due to various confounding factors, including correlated soil physicochemistry or nutrient availability. A solution is to investigate whether tolerance

It is well recognized that organic soil management stimulates bacterial biomass and activity and that including cover crops in the rotation increases soil organic matter (SOM). Yet, to date the relative impact of different cover crop species and organic vs. non-organic soil management on soil bacteria and fungi and on SOM quantity and quality remains to be tested. We used a long-term (10 years) fu

Isoprene is a highly reactive volatile organic compound emitted by vegetation, known to be a precursor of secondary organic aerosols and to enhance tropospheric ozone formation under polluted conditions. Isoprene emissions respond strongly to changes in meteorological parameters such as temperature and solar radiation. In addition, the increasing CO2 concentration has a dual effect, as it causes b

The stable carbon isotope ratio (δ13C) is a key tool in tracing the source of carbon within and across ecosystems. In isotope mixing models dissolved organic carbon (DOC) from terrestrial sources is often assigned a fixed δ13C of roughly -28‰ to -27‰ in C3 plant-dominated areas. However, the claim of a uniform δ13C distribution for terrestrial DOC sources of different reactivity has seldom been te

Adaptation to new ecological niches is known to spur population diversification and may lead to speciation if gene flow is ceased. While adaptation to the same ecological niche is expected to be parallel, it is more difficult to predict whether selection against maladaptive hybridization in secondary sympatry results in parallel divergence also in traits that are not directly related to the ecolog

Climate change is a pervasive threat to biodiversity. While range shifts are a known consequence of climate warming contributing to regional community change, less is known about how species’ positions shift within their climatic niches. Furthermore, whether the relative importance of different climatic variables prompting such shifts varies with changing climate remains unclear. Here we analysed

Premise: Flower phenotypes evolve to attract pollinators and to ensure efficient pollen transfer to and from the bodies of pollinators or, in self-compatible bisexual flowers, between anthers and stigmas. If functionally interacting traits are genetically correlated, response to selection may be subject to genetic constraints. Genetic constraints can be assessed by quantifying standing genetic var

Poikilotherms have two major alternative strategies to deal with the inhospitable conditions of temperate winters: hibernation or migration. The vast majority of insects spend winter in a species-specific diapause resting stage, while others remain reproductively active after having migrated to more hospitable environments in the autumn. The butterfly clade Nymphalini offers an interesting possibi

The study presents a multi-proxy archive from hypersaline coastal Lake Chokrak in eastern Crimea, a steppe region which is particularly susceptible to moisture fluctuations. XRF, organic carbon and nitrogen, and palynological analyses are used to reconstruct the evolution of the lake and landscape development around it and to provide information about the driving forces behind those changes, such

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different v

Monitoring available feed for livestock is a key factor for developing pastoralism in the Sahel, and satellite images has proven useful in monitoring dry mass on large spatial scales. This approach requires field measurements of dry mass (herbaceous and woody plants) to calibrate such models based on Earth observation data. However, the need for representative field measurements can be a challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated many of the challenges with using science to guide planning and policymaking. One such challenge has to do with how to manage, represent and communicate uncertainties in epidemiological models. This is considerably complicated, we argue, by the fact that the models themselves are often instrumental in structuring the involved uncertainties. In this paper we explor

Aim: Global interspecific body size distributions have been suggested to be shaped by selection pressures arising from biotic and abiotic factors such as temperature, predation and parasitism. Here, we investigated the ecological and evolutionary drivers of global latitudinal size gradients in an old insect order. Location: Global. Taxon: Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies). Methods: We compiled