Helge Bruelheide, Jürgen Dengler, Oliver Purschke, Jonathan Lenoir et al.
Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can f...
Helge Bruelheide, Jürgen Dengler, Borja Jiménez‐Alfaro, Oliver Purschke et al.
Abstract Aims Vegetation‐plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co‐occurring in the same community. Vegetation‐plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continen...
Francesco María Sabatini, Borja Jiménez‐Alfaro, Ute Jandt, Milan Chytrý et al.
Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (loc...
Francesco María Sabatini, Jonathan Lenoir, Tarek Hattab, Elise Arnst et al.
Abstract Motivation Assessing biodiversity status and trends in plant communities is critical for understanding, quantifying and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems. Vegetation plots record the occurrence or abundance of all plant species co‐occurring within delimited local areas. ...
Jüergen Kreyling, Jürgen Dengler, Julia Walter, Nikolay Velev et al.
Biodiversity can buffer ecosystem functioning against extreme climatic events, but few experiments have explicitly tested this. Here, we present the first multisite biodiversity × drought manipulation experiment to examine drought resistance and recovery at five temperate and Mediterranean grassland...
Andrey V. Malyshev, Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan, Carl Beierkuhnlein, Manuel J. Steinbauer et al.
Within-species and among-species differences in growth responses to a changing climate have been well documented, yet the relative magnitude of within-species vs. among-species variation has remained largely unexplored. This missing comparison impedes our ability to make general predictions of biodi...
Daniel C. Laughlin, Andrew Siefert, Jesse R. Fleri, Shersingh Joseph Tumber‐Dávila et al.
Evolutionary radiations of woody taxa within arid environments were made possible by multiple trait innovations including deep roots and embolism-resistant xylem, but little is known about how these traits have coevolved across the phylogeny of woody plants or how they jointly influence the distribu...
Manuel J. Steinbauer, Carl Beierkuhnlein, Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan, David E. V. Harter et al.
Abstract Positive plant–plant interactions (i.e. facilitation) receive increasing attention as a potentially important driver of community assembly. We conducted a systematic literature review indicating broad support for positive effects of potential facilitator species. However, a large majority o...
Vanessa Vetter, Jüergen Kreyling, Jürgen Dengler, Iva Apostolova et al.
Higher biodiversity can stabilize the productivity and functioning of grassland communities when subjected to extreme climatic events. The positive biodiversity-stability relationship emerges via increased resistance and/or recovery to these events. However, invader presence might disrupt this diver...
Thore Engel, Helge Bruelheide, Daniela Hoss, Francesco María Sabatini et al.
Abstract Aim Theoretical, experimental and observational studies have shown that biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are influenced by functional community structure through two mutually non‐exclusive mechanisms: (1) the dominance effect (which relates to the traits of the dominan...