Managing multiple ecosystem services (ESs) across landscapes presents a central challenge for ecosystem-based management, because services often exhibit spatiotemporal variation and weak associations with co-occurring ESs. Further focus on the mechanistic relationships among ESs and their underlying biophysical processes provides greater insight into the causes of variation and covariation among...
Vegetation at the aquatic–terrestrial interface can alter landscape features through its growth and interactions with sediment and fluids. Even similar species may impart different effects due to variation in their interactions and feedbacks with the environment. Consequently, replacement of one engineering species by another can cause significant change in the...
Exotic species dominate many communities; however the functional significance of species’ biogeographic origin remains highly contentious. This debate is fuelled in part by the lack of globally replicated, systematic data assessing the relationship between species provenance, function and response to perturbations. We examined the abundance of native and exotic plant...
Invasive species can alter the succession of ecological communities because they are
often adapted to the disturbed conditions that initiate succession. The extent to which this
occurs may depend on how widely they are distributed across environmental gradients and
how long they persist over the course of succession. We focus...
Disease dilution (reduced disease prevalence with increasing biodiversity) has been described for
many different pathogens. Although the mechanisms causing this phenomenon remain unclear,
the disassembly of communities to predictable subsets of species, which can be caused by
changing climate, land use, or invasive species, underlie one important hypothesis. In this...
Human alterations to nutrient cycles[superscript 1,2] and herbivore communities³⁻⁷
are affecting global biodiversity dramatically². Ecological theory predicts
these changes should be strongly counteractive: nutrient addition
drives plant species loss through intensified competition for
light, whereas herbivores prevent competitive exclusion by increasing
ground-level light, particularly in productive systems[superscript 8,9]. Here we...
Studies of experimental grassland communities¹⁻⁷ have demonstrated
that plant diversity can stabilize productivity through species
asynchrony, in which decreases in the biomass of some species
are compensated for by increases in others[superscript 1,2]. However, it remains
unknown whether these findings are relevant to natural ecosystems,
especially those for which species...
Invasions have increased the size of regional species pools, but are typically assumed to reduce native diversity. However, global-scale tests of this assumption have been elusive because of the focus on exotic species richness, rather than relative abundance. This is problematic because low invader richness can indicate invasion resistance by...
Based on regional-scale studies, aboveground production and litter decomposition are thought to positively covary, because they are driven by shared biotic and climatic factors. Until now we have been unable to test whether production and decomposition are generally coupled across climatically dissimilar regions, because we lacked replicated data collected within...
The effects of exotic species invasions on biodiversity vary with spatial scale, and documentation of local-scale changes in biodiversity following invasion is generally lacking. Coupling long-term observations of local community dynamics with experiments to determine the role played by exotic species in recruitment limitation of native species would inform both...