Search

Assessment of how 16 taxonomic groups in a lowland tropical forest resist and recover from anthropogenic disturbance shows the potential of protecting naturally regenerating secondary forests to reverse biodiversity losses.

Using a conceptual framework known as the integrative hypothesis of specialization, the authors suggest that phylogenetic constraints separate species into different layers and shape the modules of a Neotropical network composed of the frugivorous and nectarivorous interactions between bats and plants.

Human encroachment into nature alters species communities and can lead to changes in disease dynamics. Here, Meyer et al. find that coronavirus prevalence increased in less diverse bat communities, which were dominated by susceptible host species.

Long-term stability of ecological communities is vital for maintaining ecosystem functioning. Here, Blüthgen et al. show that greater land-use intensity in grasslands and forests can have negative impacts on the stability of plant and animal communities, driven primarily by variation in asynchrony between species.

The authors measure numerous ecosystem functions across an elevational gradient on Mt Kilimanjaro and find that species richness impacts function more than species turnover across sites. They also show that variation in species richness impacts ecosystem functioning more strongly at the landscape scale than at the local scale.

Explaining species richness patterns is a key question in ecology. Peterset al. sample diverse plant and animal groups across elevation on Mt. Kilimanjaro to show that, while disparate factors drive distributions of individual taxa, diversity overall decreases with elevation, mostly driven by effects of temperature.

The authors test whether spatial scale (plot, local and landscape) affects the supply of various ecosystem services in grasslands, finding that some services are predicted by plot-level properties while others depend more on landscape-level management.

Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change. Here the authors measure diversity across multiple trophic levels in agricultural grassland landscapes of varying management, finding decoupled responses of above- and belowground taxa to local factors and a strong impact of landscape-level land use.

Differential responses of plant and animal functional diversity to climatic variation could affect trait matching in mutualistic interactions. Here, Albrecht et al. show that network structure varies across an elevational gradient owing to bottom-up and top-down effects of functional diversity.

Managing forests for the supply of multiple ecosystem services (ES) is key given potential trade-offs among services. Here, the authors analyse how forest stand attributes generate trade-offs among ES and the relative contribution of forest attributes and environmental factors to predict services.

Elevational trends in biodiversity and ecosystem functions across natural and anthropogenic habitats on Mount Kilimanjaro show that the effects of land use are strongly mediated by climate.

Both a high number of species and abundance in multiple trophic levels are required for ecosystems to continue to provide the services humans require of them.

Analysis of a large grassland biodiversity dataset shows that increases in local land-use intensity cause biotic homogenization at landscape scale across microbial, plant and animal groups, both above- and belowground, that is largely independent of changes in local diversity.