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...
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...
Kevin Van Sundert, Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan, Siddharth Bharath, Yvonne M. Buckley et al.
Droughts can strongly affect grassland productivity and biodiversity, but responses differ widely. Nutrient availability may be a critical factor explaining this variation, but is often ignored in analyses of drought responses. Here, we used a standardized nutrient addition experiment covering 10 Eu...
Jüergen Kreyling, Kerstin Grant, Verena Hammerl, Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan et al.
Climate change affects all seasons, but warming is more pronounced in winter than summer at mid- and high latitudes. Winter warming can have profound ecological effects, which are rarely compared to the effects of summer warming, and causal explanations are not well established. We compared mild abo...
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...
Jüergen Kreyling, Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan, Fahmida Sultana, W. Babel et al.
Extreme drought events challenge ecosystem functioning. Ecological response to drought is studied worldwide in a growing number of field experiments by rain-out shelters. Yet, few meta-analyses face severe challenges in the comparability of studies. This is partly because build-up of drought stress ...
Mohammad Belal Uddin, Manuel J. Steinbauer, Anke Jentsch, Sharif A. Mukul et al.
Introduction of exotic plant species in the tropics has occurred since the colonial period, and has mostly been for timber production. However, due to uncontrolled distribution and lack of awareness, many of these species became invasive, and have been increasingly reported as a source of threats to...
Bernd J. Berauer, Peter A. Wilfahrt, Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan, Pia Eibes et al.
High-elevation ecosystems will experience increasing periods of above-average warmth and altered precipitation changes because of climate change. This causes uncertainties for community properties such as productivity and biodiversity. Increasing temperature may increase productivity by increasing g...
Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan, Kerstin Grant, Carl Beierkuhnlein, Jüergen Kreyling et al.
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...
Hugh A. L. Henry, Mehdi Abedi, Concepción L. Alados, Karen H. Beard et al.
Reduced precipitation treatments often are used in field experiments to explore the effects of drought on plant productivity and species composition. However, in seasonally snow-covered regions reduced precipitation also reduces snow cover, which can increase soil frost depth, decrease minimum soil ...
Mohammed Abu Sayed Arfin Khan, Carl Beierkuhnlein, Jüergen Kreyling, Sabrina Backhaus et al.
Shifts in flowering phenology of plants are indicators of climate change. The great majority of existing phenological studies refer solely to gradual warming. However, knowledge on how flowering phenology responds to changes in seasonal variation of warming and precipitation regimes is missing. We r...