Search

Changing environmental conditions and land use are threatening biodiversity on a large scale, making successful conservation and restoration essential for maintaining biodiversity. Planning of such efforts profits from information about where conditions are suitable for biotopes, to evaluate how likely successful conservation or restoration is at these sites. This study uses the distribution model Maxent to identify varying levels of conservation and restoration potential for 29 different biotopes in the central European region of Bavaria, Germany, by comparing the environmentally suitable areas identified by models with the current distribution of each biotope. We identified a conservation potential when a biotope occurred under suitable environmental conditions and a restoration potential when suitable environmental conditions were present at a site where the biotope was not observed. We found that 69.57% of biotope observations occurred under suitable environmental conditions representing a large conservation potential. Also, 22 biotopes showed more restoration potential than their current distribution and both conservation and restoration potential showed a similar geographical distribution. The approach used in this study can provide valuable insights for conservation and restoration decision-making by suggesting priority areas for the conservation and restoration of multiple biotopes. Further, it could be applied in other regions globally and by incorporating future climate projections it could identify particularly resilient locations for biotope conservation or restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization is a leading cause of biodiversity loss globally. Expanding cities alter regional ecological processes by consuming habitat and modifying biogeochemical and energetic flows. Densifying cities often lose valuable intra-urban green spaces. Despite these negative impacts, novel urban ecosystems can harbor high biodiversity and provide vital ecosystem services for urban residents. Recognizing the benefits of urban ecosystems, cities across the globe are increasingly planning for urban green infrastructure (UGI). UGI as a planning concept can transform how cities integrate biodiversity into urbanized landscapes at multiple scales and contribute to conservation goals. Full operationalization of UGI concepts can also reduce urban energy and resource demands via substituting polluting technologies by UGI, further contributing to the global conservation agenda. Realizing the potential contributions of UGI to local, regional, and global conservation goals requires addressing four inter-dependent challenges: (1) expanding social-ecological-systems thinking to include connections between complex social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS), (2) explicitly addressing multi-level governance challenges, (3) adapting SETS approaches to understand the contextual and biocultural factors shaping relationships between UGI and other causal processes in cities that shape biodiversity, and (4) operationalizing UGI systems through robust modeling and design approaches. By transforming UGI policy and research through SETS approaches to explicitly integrate biodiversity we can support global conservation challenges while improving human wellbeing in cities and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have demonstrated that biodiversity drives ecosystem functioning, yet how biodiversity loss alters ecosystems functioning and stability in the long-term lacks experimental evidence. We report temporal effects of species richness on community productivity, stability, species asynchrony, and complementarity, and how the relationships among them change over 17 years in a grassland biodiversity experiment. Productivity declined more rapidly in less diverse communities resulting in temporally strengthening positive effects of richness on productivity, complementarity, and stability. In later years asynchrony played a more important role in increasing community stability as the negative effect of richness on population stability diminished. Only during later years did species complementarity relate to species asynchrony. These results show that species complementarity and asynchrony can take more than a decade to develop strong stabilizing effects on ecosystem functioning in diverse plant communities. Thus, the mechanisms stabilizing ecosystem functioning change with community age. Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships may change over time. Here, Wagg et al. show that richness-productivity and richness stability relationships grow stronger over time in an experimental grassland community, and shed light on the ecological mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It remains unclear whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against climate extremes, which are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide. Early results suggested that the ecosystem productivity of diverse grassland plant communities was more resistant, changing less during drought, and more resilient, recovering more quickly after drought, than that of depauperate communities. However, subsequent experimental tests produced mixed results. Here we use data from 46 experiments that manipulated grassland plant diversity to test whether biodiversity provides resistance during and resilience after climate events. We show that biodiversity increased ecosystem resistance for a broad range of climate events, including wet or dry, moderate or extreme, and brief or prolonged events. Across all studies and climate events, the productivity of low-diversity communities with one or two species changed by approximately 50% during climate events, whereas that of high-diversity communities with 16-32 species was more resistant, changing by only approximately 25%. By a year after each climate event, ecosystem productivity had often fully recovered, or overshot, normal levels of productivity in both high- and low-diversity communities, leading to no detectable dependence of ecosystem resilience on biodiversity. Our results suggest that biodiversity mainly stabilizes ecosystem productivity, and productivity-dependent ecosystem services, by increasing resistance to climate events. Anthropogenic environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss thus seem likely to decrease ecosystem stability, and restoration of biodiversity to increase it, mainly by changing the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the diversity of plant communities may undermine the economically and environmentally important consumer species they support. The structure of trophic interactions determines the sensitivity of food webs to perturbations, but rigorous assessments of plant diversity effects on network topology are lacking. Here, we use highly resolved networks from a grassland biodiversity experiment to test how plant diversity affects the prevalence of different food web motifs, the smaller recurrent sub-networks that form the building blocks of complex networks. We find that the representation of tri-trophic chain, apparent competition and exploitative competition motifs increases with plant species richness, while the representation of omnivory motifs decreases. Moreover, plant species richness is associated with altered patterns of local interactions among arthropod consumers in which plants are not directly involved. These findings reveal novel structuring forces that plant diversity exerts on food webs with potential implications for the persistence and functioning of multitrophic communities. Plant diversity affects ecosystem function in myriad ways, but the effect on food webs has received less investigation. Here, the authors use high-resolution food web data from a grassland diversity experiment to show that apparent and exploitative competition motifs increase with plant diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecosystem functioning depends on biodiversity at multiple trophic levels, yet relationships between multitrophic diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality have been poorly explored, with studies often focusing on individual trophic levels and functions and on specific ecosystem types. Here, we show that plant diversity can affect ecosystem functioning both directly and by affecting other trophic levels. Using data on 13 trophic groups and 13 ecosystem functions from two large biodiversity experiments-one representing temperate grasslands and the other subtropical forests-we found that plant diversity increases multifunctionality through elevated multitrophic diversity. Across both experiments, the association between multitrophic diversity and multifunctionality was stronger than the relationship between the diversity of individual trophic groups and multifunctionality. Our results also suggest that the role of multitrophic diversity is greater in forests than in grasslands. These findings imply that, to promote sustained ecosystem multifunctionality, conservation planning must consider the diversity of both plants and higher trophic levels., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)

A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated that biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem functioning over time in grassland ecosystems. However, the relative importance of different facets of biodiversity underlying the diversity-stability relationship remains unclear. Here we use data from 39 grassland biodiversity experiments and structural equation modelling to investigate the roles of species richness, phylogenetic diversity and both the diversity and community-weighted mean of functional traits representing the 'fast-slow' leaf economics spectrum in driving the diversity-stability relationship. We found that high species richness and phylogenetic diversity stabilize biomass production via enhanced asynchrony in the performance of co-occurring species. Contrary to expectations, low phylogenetic diversity enhances ecosystem stability directly, albeit weakly. While the diversity of fast-slow functional traits has a weak effect on ecosystem stability, communities dominated by slow species enhance ecosystem stability by increasing mean biomass production relative to the standard deviation of biomass over time. Our in-depth, integrative assessment of factors influencing the diversity-stability relationship demonstrates a more multicausal relationship than has been previously acknowledged.