Soil microbial communities are vital for multiple ecosystem processes and services. In particular, soil microbial food webs are key determinants of soil biodiversity, functioning and stability. Unclear, however, is how struc-tural features of food webs, su ...
Freshwater ecosystems are endangered, underfunded and understudied, making new methods such as passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) essential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of data collection. However, many challenges are still to be addressed ...
Ocean warming and other anthropogenic impacts have led to a global decline in many photosymbiotic cnidarians, most notably reef-building corals. But some species of the symbiotic and (sub-)tropical upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea are increasingly reported ...
Tree-related microhabitats (TreMs) have been identified as key features for forest-dwelling taxa and are often employed as measures for biodiversity conservation in integrative forest management. However, managing forests to ensure an uninterrupted resourc ...
Parts of the Antarctic are experiencing dramatic ecosystem change due to rapid and record warming, which may weaken biogeographic boundaries and dispersal barriers, increasing the risks of biological invasions. In this study, we collected air samples from ...
This paper introduces the background, concept and definition of the Industry Commons. It initiates a discussion on the positioning of the Industry Commons Ecosystem (ICE) with respect to current research directions in advanced manufacturing and production ...
Short-term plant respiration (R) increases exponentially with rising temperature, but drought could reduce respiration by reducing growth and metabolism. Acclimation may alter these responses. We examined if species with different drought responses would d ...
Ecosystem services provided by coral reefs may be susceptible to the combined effects of benthic species shifts and anthropogenic nutrient pollution, but related field studies are scarce. We thus investigated in situ how dissolved inorganic nutrient enrich ...
This thesis is concerned with regular patterns found in ecology and biology, their linkages and the statistical description of their fluctuations around average trends. Among such patterns, often conforming to power laws, well-known examples include the Sp ...
Riparian zones are some of the most valuable and at the same time endangered ecosystems in the world. Their progressive degradation caused by anthropogenic pressure calls for the adoption of effective, resilient restoration strategies. However, a full unde ...
Loss of plant diversity resulting from forecasted drought events is likely to alter soil functioning and affect earthworm communities. Plant-soil interactions are expected to play an important role in mediating climate change effects on soil decomposers. I ...
There is a link between phenomena covered by the umbrella term «urban mobility» and the wealth of social and spatial dynamics active in de-structuring the city as a coherent spatial model, a process known as «urban fragmentation». It is therefore reasonabl ...
Natural communities commonly contain many different species and functional groups, and multiple types of species interactions act simultaneously, such as competition, predation, commensalism or mutualism. However, experimental and theoretical investigat ...
Models of vegetation dynamics that are designed for application at spatial scales larger than individual forest gaps suffer from several limitations. Typically, either a population average approximation is used that results in unrealistic tree allometry an ...
Functional traits (FT) offer a new framework to understand the ecology of organisms and overcome taxonomic difficulties that currently limit the study of minute soil taxa. FT are likely to be selected by environmental filters and hence they may provide mor ...
The Three-Georges Dam holds many records in the history of engineering. While the dam has produced benefits in terms of flood control, hydropower generation and increased navigation capacity of the Yangtze River, serious questions have been raised concerni ...
Phytotechnologies are ecotechnologies relating to the use of vegetation, to resolve environmental problems in a watershed management, by prevention of landscape degradation, remediation and restoration of degraded ecosystems, kontrol of environmental proce ...
A major issue in modern ecology is to understand how ecological complexity at broad scales is regulated by mechanisms operating at the organismic level. What specific underlying processes are essential for a macroecological pattern to emerge? Here, we anal ...
Saproxylic (dead-wood-associated) and old-growth species are among the most threatened species in European forest ecosystems, as they are susceptible to intensive forest management. Identifying areas with particular relevant features of biodiversity is of ...
Cutover peatlands cover large surfaces of high potential value for biodiversity and carbon sequestration function if successfully restored but the evaluation of restoration success is not straighforward. We assessed the bioindicator value of organic mat ...
