Ecological traits for 1374 arthropod species collected in a German grassland.

Arthropods play an important role in grasslands, making trait-based research a valuable approach to advance our understanding of ecosystem functioning. However, a wide range of functional traits for complex arthropod communities is often not available in a single source but must be compiled from multiple references and databases. Using suction and pitfall sampling in the field site of the Jena Experiment, we collected Araneae, Coleoptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Isopoda, Myriapoda, and Orthoptera over a period of 10 years to document arthropod taxa in the area.

NDVI and vegetation volume as predictors of urban bird diversity.

Urban expansion and densification pose a challenge to urban biodiversity. Rapid estimation of biodiversity could help urban planners balance development and conservation goals. While the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) has proven useful for predicting urban bird diversity, new products derived from remote sensing, such as vegetation volume, could provide more detailed descriptions of available habitat, potentially improving biodiversity predictions.

JenaTron - An Experimental Approach to Study the Effects of Plant History and Soil History on Grassland Ecosystem Functioning.

The global loss of biodiversity has motivated many studies that experimentally vary plant species richness and examine the consequences for ecosystem functioning. Such experiments generally show a positive relationship between above- and below-ground biodiversity and the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Moreover, this relationship tends to strengthen over time, seen as enhanced functioning of diverse plant communities and reduced functioning of low-diversity plant communities.

Plant species richness promotes the decoupling of leaf and root defence traits while species-specific responses in physical and chemical defences are rare.

The increased positive impact of plant diversity on ecosystem functioning is often attributed to the accumulation of mutualists and dilution of antagonists in diverse plant communities. While increased plant diversity alters traits related to resource acquisition, it remains unclear whether it reduces defence allocation, whether this reduction differs between roots and leaves, or varies among species. To answer these questions, we assessed the effect of plant species richness, plant species identity and their interaction on the expression of 23 physical and chemical leaf and fine root defence traits of 16 plant species in a 19-yr-old biodiversity experiment.

Plant diversity enhances ecosystem multifunctionality via multitrophic diversity.

Ecosystem functioning depends on biodiversity at multiple trophic levels, yet relationships between multitrophic diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality have been poorly explored, with studies often focusing on individual trophic levels and functions and on specific ecosystem types. Here, we show that plant diversity can affect ecosystem functioning both directly and by affecting other trophic levels. Using data on 13 trophic groups and 13 ecosystem functions from two large biodiversity experiments-one representing temperate grasslands and the other subtropical forests-we found that plant diversity increases multifunctionality through elevated multitrophic diversity.

Plant diversity and community age stabilize ecosystem multifunctionality.

It is well known that biodiversity positively affects ecosystem functioning, leading to enhanced ecosystem stability. However, this knowledge is mainly based on analyses using single ecosystem functions, while studies focusing on the stability of ecosystem multifunctionality (EMF) are rare. Taking advantage of a long-term grassland biodiversity experiment, we studied the effect of plant diversity (1-60 species) on EMF over 5 years, its temporal stability, as well as multifunctional resistance and resilience to a 2-year drought event.

Escape from natural enemies depends on the enemies, the invader, and competition.

The enemy release hypothesis (ERH) attributes the success of some exotic plant species to reduced top-down effects of natural enemies in the non-native range relative to the native range. Many studies have tested this idea, but very few have considered the simultaneous effects of multiple kinds of enemies on more than one invasive species in both the native and non-native ranges. Here, we examined the effects of two important groups of natural enemies-insect herbivores and soil biota-on the performance of (native to Europe but invasive in the USA) and (native to the USA but invasive in Europe) in their native and non-native ranges, and in the presence and absence of competition.

The results of biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments are realistic.

A large body of research shows that biodiversity loss can reduce ecosystem functioning. However, much of the evidence for this relationship is drawn from biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments in which biodiversity loss is simulated by randomly assembling communities of varying species diversity, and ecosystem functions are measured. This random assembly has led some ecologists to question the relevance of biodiversity experiments to real-world ecosystems, where community assembly or disassembly may be non-random and influenced by external drivers, such as climate, soil conditions or land use.

Biodiversity increases multitrophic energy use efficiency, flow and storage in grasslands.

The continuing loss of global biodiversity has raised questions about the risk that species extinctions pose for the functioning of natural ecosystems and the services that they provide for human wellbeing. There is consensus that, on single trophic levels, biodiversity sustains functions; however, to understand the full range of biodiversity effects, a holistic and multitrophic perspective is needed. Here, we apply methods from ecosystem ecology that quantify the structure and dynamics of the trophic network using ecosystem energetics to data from a large grassland biodiversity experiment.

On the functional relationship between biodiversity and economic value.

Biodiversity's contribution to human welfare has become a key argument for maintaining and enhancing biodiversity in managed ecosystems. The functional relationship between biodiversity () and economic value () is, however, insufficiently understood, despite the premise of a positive-concave relationship that dominates scientific and political arenas. Here, we review how individual links between biodiversity, ecosystem functions (), and services affect resulting relationships.

A multitrophic perspective on biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research.

Concern about the functional consequences of unprecedented loss in biodiversity has prompted biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research to become one of the most active fields of ecological research in the past 25 years. Hundreds of experiments have manipulated biodiversity as an independent variable and found compelling support that the functioning of ecosystems increases with the diversity of their ecological communities. This research has also identified some of the mechanisms underlying BEF relationships, some context-dependencies of the strength of relationships, as well as implications for various ecosystem services that mankind depends upon.

Plant diversity alters the representation of motifs in food webs.

Changes in the diversity of plant communities may undermine the economically and environmentally important consumer species they support. The structure of trophic interactions determines the sensitivity of food webs to perturbations, but rigorous assessments of plant diversity effects on network topology are lacking. Here, we use highly resolved networks from a grassland biodiversity experiment to test how plant diversity affects the prevalence of different food web motifs, the smaller recurrent sub-networks that form the building blocks of complex networks.

A meta food web for invertebrate species collected in a European grassland.

Patterns of feeding interactions between species are thought to influence the stability of communities and the flux of nutrients and energy through ecosystems. However, surprisingly few well-resolved food webs allow us to evaluate factors that influence the architecture of species interactions. We constructed a meta food web consisting of 714 invertebrate species collected over 9 years of suction and pitfall sampling campaigns in the Jena Experiment, a long-term grassland biodiversity experiment located in Jena, Germany.

Multiple facets of biodiversity drive the diversity-stability relationship.

A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated that biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem functioning over time in grassland ecosystems. However, the relative importance of different facets of biodiversity underlying the diversity-stability relationship remains unclear. Here we use data from 39 grassland biodiversity experiments and structural equation modelling to investigate the roles of species richness, phylogenetic diversity and both the diversity and community-weighted mean of functional traits representing the 'fast-slow' leaf economics spectrum in driving the diversity-stability relationship.

Biodiversity-multifunctionality relationships depend on identity and number of measured functions.

Biodiversity ensures ecosystem functioning and provisioning of ecosystem services, but it remains unclear how biodiversity-ecosystem multifunctionality relationships depend on the identity and number of functions considered. Here, we demonstrate that ecosystem multifunctionality, based on 82 indicator variables of ecosystem functions in a grassland biodiversity experiment, increases strongly with increasing biodiversity. Analysing subsets of functions showed that the effects of biodiversity on multifunctionality were stronger when more functions were included and that the strength of the biodiversity effects depended on the identity of the functions included.

High Survival of Lasius niger during Summer Flooding in a European Grassland.

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency of extreme events, such as flooding and droughts, which are anticipated to have negative effects on the biodiversity of primary producers and consequently the associated consumer communities. Here we assessed the effects of an extreme early summer flooding event in 2013 on ant colonies along an experimental gradient of plant species richness in a temperate grassland. We tested the effects of flood duration, plant species richness, plant cover, soil temperature, and soil porosity on ant occurrence and abundance.

Plant diversity effects on grassland productivity are robust to both nutrient enrichment and drought.

Global change drivers are rapidly altering resource availability and biodiversity. While there is consensus that greater biodiversity increases the functioning of ecosystems, the extent to which biodiversity buffers ecosystem productivity in response to changes in resource availability remains unclear. We use data from 16 grassland experiments across North America and Europe that manipulated plant species richness and one of two essential resources-soil nutrients or water-to assess the direction and strength of the interaction between plant diversity and resource alteration on above-ground productivity and net biodiversity, complementarity, and selection effects.

Experimental Manipulation of Grassland Plant Diversity Induces Complex Shifts in Aboveground Arthropod Diversity.

Changes in producer diversity cause multiple changes in consumer communities through various mechanisms. However, past analyses investigating the relationship between plant diversity and arthropod consumers focused only on few aspects of arthropod diversity, e.g.

Secondary bacterial symbiont community in aphids responds to plant diversity.

Biodiversity is important for ecosystem functioning and biotic interactions. In experimental grasslands, increasing plant species richness is known to increase the diversity of associated herbivores and their predators. If these interactions can also involve endosymbionts that reside within a plant or animal host is currently unknown.

Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes.

It remains unclear whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against climate extremes, which are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide. Early results suggested that the ecosystem productivity of diverse grassland plant communities was more resistant, changing less during drought, and more resilient, recovering more quickly after drought, than that of depauperate communities. However, subsequent experimental tests produced mixed results.

Towards a standardized Rapid Ecosystem Function Assessment (REFA).

Quantifying ecosystem functioning is important for both fundamental and applied ecological research. However, there is currently a gap between the data available and the data needed to address topical questions, such as the drivers of functioning in different ecosystems under global change or the best management to sustain provisioning of ecosystem functions and services. Here, we identify a set of important functions and propose a Rapid Ecosystem Function Assessment (REFA).

Plant diversity impacts decomposition and herbivory via changes in aboveground arthropods.

Loss of plant diversity influences essential ecosystem processes as aboveground productivity, and can have cascading effects on the arthropod communities in adjacent trophic levels. However, few studies have examined how those changes in arthropod communities can have additional impacts on ecosystem processes caused by them (e.g.

Complex effects of fertilization on plant and herbivore performance in the presence of a plant competitor and activated carbon.

Plant-herbivore interactions are influenced by host plant quality which in turn is affected by plant growth conditions. Competition is the major biotic and nutrient availability a major abiotic component of a plant's growth environment. Yet, surprisingly few studies have investigated impacts of competition and nutrient availability on herbivore performance and reciprocal herbivore effects on plants.