Bernhard Schmid

University of Zurich | UZH · Department of Geography

Functional diversity is a critical component driving ecosystem functioning. Spatially explicit data of plant functional traits and diversity are essential for understanding biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning. Here we retrieved three morphological traits (95th quantile height, leaf area index, foliage height diversity) and three physiolog...

Carbon-focused climate mitigation strategies are becoming increasingly important in forests. However, with ongoing biodiversity declines we require better knowledge of how much such strategies account for biodiversity. We particularly lack information across multiple trophic levels and on established forests, where the interplay between carbon stoc...

Extreme weather events are occurring more frequently, and research has shown that plant diversity can help mitigate impacts of climate change by increasing plant productivity and ecosystem stability. Although soil temperature and its stability are key determinants of essential ecosystem processes related to water and nutrient uptake as well as soil...

Ecosystem management aims at providing many ecosystem services simultaneously. Such ecosystem multifunctionality can be limited by trade-offs and increased by synergies among the underlying ecosystem functions (EF), which need to be understood to develop targeted management. Previous studies found differences in the correlation between EFs. We hypo...

1. Plant microbiomes are known to influence host fitness and ecosystem functioning, but mechanisms regulating their structure are poorly understood. 2. Here, we explored the assembly mechanisms of leaf epiphytic and endophytic bacterial communities using a subtropical forest biodiversity experiment. 3. Both epiphytic and endophytic bacterial divers...

Mycorrhizae are symbiotic associations between terrestrial plants and fungi in which fungi obtain nutrients in exchange for plant photosynthates. However, it remains unclear how different types of mycorrhizae affect their host interactions and productivity. Using a long-term experiment with a diversity gradient of arbuscular (AM) and ectomycorrhiza...

Remote sensing enhances large-scale biodiversity monitoring by overcoming temporal and spatial limitations of ground-based measurements and allows assessment of multiple plant traits simultaneously. The total set of traits and their variation over time is specific for each individual and can reveal information about the genetic composition of fores...

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...

Woody and herbaceous habits represent one of the most distinct contrasts among angiosperms, and the proportion of woody species in floras (i.e., “woodiness” hereafter) represents a fundamental structural element of plant diversity. Despite its core influence on ecosystem processes, spatio‐temporal patterns in woodiness remain poorly understood. Her...

Addressing global biodiversity loss requires an expanded focus on multiple dimensions of biodiversity. While most studies have focused on the consequences of plant interspecific diversity, our mechanistic understanding of how genetic diversity within plant species affects plant productivity remains limited. Here, we use a tree species × genetic div...

Plant ecology and biodiversity research have increasingly incorporated trait-based approaches and remote sensing. Compared with traditional field survey (which typically samples individual trees), remote sensing enables quantifying functional traits over large contiguous areas, but assigning trait values to biological units such as species and indi...

Woody plant encroachment in arid grasslands may reduce plant uptake and soil storage of carbon (C) with consequences for the global C cycle, yet multi-site comparative studies have not been done so far and experiments are not feasible due to the long time needed for soil organic C (SOC) to accumulate. We selected multiple grassland sites with ≥50 %...

Games as a didactic tool (e. g., puzzles) are gaining recognition in environmental education to promote skill development, but also to develop a specific understanding of the natural world. However, a children’s puzzle containing representations of nature may unwillingly lead to “misconceptions” of biodiversity themes and processes, and an over-sim...

In plant communities, diversity often increases community productivity and functioning, but the specific underlying drivers are difficult to identify. Most ecological theories attribute the positive diversity effects to complementary niches occupied by different species or genotypes. However, the type of niche complementarity often remains unclear,...

Extending knowledge on ecosystem stability to larger spatial scales is urgently needed because present local-scale studies are generally ineffective in guiding management and conservation decisions of an entire region with diverse plant communities. We investigated stability of plant productivity across spatial scales and hierarchical levels of org...

Experiments under controlled conditions have established that ecosystem functioning is generally positively related to levels of biodiversity, but it is unclear how widespread these effects are in real-world settings and whether they can be harnessed for ecosystem restoration. We used a long-term, field-scale tropical restoration experiment to test...

An important mechanism promoting species coexistence is conspecific negative density dependence (CNDD), which inhibits conspecific neighbors by accumulating host-specific enemies near adult trees. Natural enemies may be genotype-specific and regulate offspring dynamics more strongly than non-offspring, which is often neglected due to the difficulty...

Forest biodiversity is critical for many ecosystem functions and services at plot scale, but it is uncertain how biodiversity influences ecosystem functioning across environmental gradients and contiguous larger areas. We used remote sensing and process-based terrestrial biosphere modeling to explore functional diversity–productivity relationships...

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is one of the most recognized global patterns of species richness exhibited across a wide range of taxa. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed in the past two centuries to explain LDG, but rigorous tests of the drivers of LDGs have been limited by a lack of high-quality global species richness data. Here we...

Trait-based approaches, focusing on the functional characteristics of vascular plants in a community, have been increasingly used in plant ecology and biodiversity research. Compared with traditional field survey (which typically samples individual trees), remote sensing enables quantifying functional traits over large contiguous areas, but assigni...

Numerous studies have demonstrated that biodiversity drives ecosystem functioning, yet there is a lack of knowledge about how biodiversity loss alters ecosystems functioning and stability in the long-term. We report on temporal changes in the species richness–productivity, –stability, –species asynchrony, and –complementarity relationships over 17...

Despite substantial progress in understanding global biodiversity loss, major taxonomic and geographic knowledge gaps remain. Decision makers often rely on expert judgement to fill knowledge gaps, but are rarely able to engage with sufficiently large and diverse groups of specialists. To improve understanding of the perspectives of thousands of bio...

1. Tree survival affects forest biodiversity, structure and functioning. However, little is known about feedback effects of biodiversity on survival and its dependence on functional traits and interannual climatic variability. 2. With an individual‐based dataset from a large subtropical forest biodiversity experiment, we evaluated how species richn...

Growing threats from extreme climatic events and biodiversity loss have raised concerns about their interactive consequences for ecosystem functioning. Evidence suggests biodiversity can buffer ecosystem functioning during such climatic events. However, whether exposure to extreme climatic events will strengthen the biodiversity-dependent buffering...

Biodiversity drives the maintenance and stability of ecosystem functioning as well as many of nature’s benefits to people, yet people cause substantial biodiversity change. Despite broad consensus about a positive relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF), the underlying mechanisms and their context-dependencies are not well...

1. Interspecific niche complementarity is a key mechanism posited to explain positive species richness—productivity relationships in plant communities. However, the exact nature of the niche dimensions that plant species partition remains poorly known. 2. Species may partition abiotic resources that limit their growth, but species may also be speci...

Soil fungi are a major factor maintaining plant diversity and productivity, but the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. Based on a biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiment in southeast China, we evaluated the impacts of root-associated soil fungi on plant total, above- and belowground biomass production in monocultures and in di...

1. While most studies yield positive relationships between biodiversity (B) and ecosystem functioning (EF), awareness is growing that BEF relationships can vary with ecological context. The awareness has led to increased efforts to understand how contemporary environmental context modifies BEF relationships, but the role of historical context, and...

Multispecies tree planting has long been applied in forestry and landscape restoration in the hope of providing better timber production and ecosystem services; however, a systematic assessment of its effectiveness is lacking. We compiled a global dataset of matched single-species and multispecies plantations to evaluate the impact of multispecies...

Positive effects of plant species richness on community biomass in biodiversity experiments are often stronger than those from observational field studies. This may be because experiments are initiated with randomly assembled species compositions whereas field communities have experienced filtering. We compared aboveground biomass production of ran...

Native plant communities are often invaded by multiple alien species. It is still unclear how increasing diversity of alien invasive species suppresses the growth of native species and thus contributes to invasion success. In the subtropical monsoon region of southeast China, we experimentally created a native plant community with 18 herbaceous spe...

Addressing global biodiversity loss requires an expanded focus on multiple dimensions of biodiversity. While most studies have focused on the consequences of plant interspecific diversity, our mechanistic understanding of how the diversity within a given plant species (genetic diversity) affects plant productivity remains limited. Here, we use a tr...

Extreme events such as the summer drought of 2018 in Central Europe are projected to occur more frequently in the future and may cause major damages including increased tree mortality and negative impacts on forests ecosystem services. Here we quantify the response of > 1 million forest pixels of 10 x 10 m across Switzerland to the 2018 drought in...

Three decades of research have demonstrated that biodiversity can promote the functioning of ecosystems. Yet, it is unclear whether the positive effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning will persist under various types of global environmental change drivers. We conducted a meta‐analysis of 46 factorial experiments manipulating both species...

Humans have influenced ecosystems for a very long time. The agricultural revolution led to the development of a large number of crops in various regions of the world, which still form the basis of modern‐day food production systems. This chapter presents examples for the use of biodiversity to increase ecosystem services in managed ecosystems, in p...

Plants acting as ecosystem engineers create habitats and facilitate biodiversity maintenance within plant communities. Furthermore, biodiversity research has demonstrated that plant diversity enhances the productivity and functioning of ecosystems. However, these two fields of research developed in parallel and independent from one another, with th...

Satellite‐derived normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data are increasingly relied on to reveal the growth responses of vegetation to climate change, yet the vegetation growth tracking accuracy of these data remains unclear due to a lack of long‐term field data. Here, we adopted a unique field‐measured seasonal aboveground biomass dataset...

Extreme climatic events threaten forests and their climate mitigation potential globally. Understanding the drivers promoting ecosystem stability is therefore considered crucial for mitigating adverse climate change effects on forests. Here, we use structural equation models to explain how tree species richness, asynchronous species dynamics, speci...

Forest restoration increases global forest area and ecosystem services such as primary productivity and carbon storage. How tree species functional composition impacts the provisioning of these services as forests develop is sparsely studied. We used 10-year data from 478 plots with 191,200 trees in a forest biodiversity experiment in subtropical C...

There is an urgent need to extend knowledge on ecosystem temporal stability to larger spatial scales because presently available local-scale studies generally do not provide effective guide for management and conservation decisions at the level of an entire region with diverse plant communities. We investigated temporal stability of plant biomass p...

Aims We have found a positive effect of woody plants on total plant carbon (C) storage in less arid grassland was shifted to a negative effect in arid grasslands in Xinjiang, a typical arid region in China. In this study, we further assessed the effects of woody plants on aboveground primary productivity (ANPP) and soil organic C (SOC) storage and...

Relationships between biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions (that is, ecosystem multifunctionality) are context-dependent. Both plant and soil microbial diversity have been reported to regulate ecosystem multifunctionality, but how their relative importance varies along environmental gradients remains poorly understood. Here, we relate plan...

Background Apomixis, the asexual reproduction through seeds, occurs in over 40 plant families and avoids the hidden cost of sex. Apomictic plants are thought to have an advantage in sparse populations and when colonizing new areas but may have a disadvantage in changing environments because they propagate via fixed genotypes. In this study, we sepa...

Plant species richness (PSR) is known to affect soil organic carbon (SOC) storage. However, due to the complex origin and composition of SOC, mechanisms driving the PSR-SOC relationship are not yet fully revealed, hampering an accurate prediction of SOC dynamics under changing plant diversity. Here we investigate the effect of PSR on SOC accumulati...

1. Trait-based ecology holds the promise to explain how plant communities work, for example, how functional diversity may support community productivity. However, so far it has been difficult to combine field-based approaches assessing traits at the level of plant individuals with limited spatial coverage and approaches using remote sensing (RS) wi...

Resource allocation to reproduction is a critical trait for plant fitness1,2. This trait, called harvest index in the agricultural context3–5, determines how plant biomass is converted to seed yield and consequently financial revenue from numerous major staple crops. While plant diversity has been demonstrated to increase plant biomass6–8, plant di...

In this perspective article we start from the theories of constructivism and conceptual change within the field of education to develop and present hypotheses about how understandings of biodiversity and diversity more generally are formed. We argue that extrinsic and circumstantial elements from everyday experiences are relevant in shaping underst...

1. Plant and soil microbial diversity are linked through a range of interactions, including the exchange of carbon and nutrients but also herbivory and pathogenic effects. Over time, associations between plant communities and their soil microbiota may strengthen and become more specific, resulting in stronger associations between plant and soil mic...

Growing threats from extreme climatic events and biodiversity loss have raised concerns about their interactive consequences for ecosystem functioning. Evidence suggests that biodiversity is crucial to buffer ecosystem functioning facing climatic extremes. However, whether evolutionary processes in species mixtures underpin such biodiversity-depend...

In a recent paper, Schoolmaster, Zirbel, and Cronin (2020) (SZC) claim "Formal causal analysis show[s] that biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) correlations are non-causal associations." If this conclusion is accepted as true, it suggests a reconsideration of much of our current understanding of how biodiversity relates to the functioning of ecos...

In a recent paper, Schoolmaster, Zirbel, and Cronin (2020) (SZC) claim "Formal causal analysis show[s] that biodiversity-ecosystem function (BEF) correlations are non-causal associations." If this conclusion is accepted as true, it suggests a reconsideration of much of our current understanding of how biodiversity relates to the functioning of ecos...

Theoretical and empirical advances have revealed the importance of biodiversity for stabilizing ecosystem functions through time. Despite the global degradation of soils, whether the loss of soil microbial diversity can destabilize ecosystem functioning is poorly understood. Here, we experimentally quantified the contribution of soil fungal and bac...

Background Apomixis, the asexual reproduction through seeds, occurs in over 40 plant families and avoids the hidden cost of sex. Apomictic plants are thought to have an advantage in sparse populations and when colonizing new areas but may have a disadvantage in changing environments because they propagate via fixed genotypes. As a consequence of cl...

Our planet is facing significant changes of biodiversity across spatial scales. Although the negative effects of local biodiversity (α diversity) loss on ecosystem stability are well documented, the consequences of biodiversity changes at larger spatial scales, in particular biotic homogenization, i.e. reduced species turnover across space (β diver...

Many alternative hypotheses have been proposed about the mechanisms governing plant community structure and how plant species compete for resources. Seeking general conclusions requires identifying those hypotheses, describing them and comparing the results of the studies that tested them in a diversity of scenarios. However, comprehensive reviews...

Biodiversity science in China has seen rapid growth over recent decades, ranging from baseline biodiversity studies to understanding the processes behind evolution across dynamic regions such as the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. We review research, including species catalogues, biodiversity monitoring, the origins, distributions, maintenance, and threat...

Biodiversity science in China has seen rapid growth over recent decades, ranging from baseline biodiversity studies to understanding the processes behind evolution across dynamic regions such as the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. We review research, including species catalogues; biodiversity monitoring; the origins, distributions, maintenance and threats...

1. Plant diversity begets diversity at other trophic levels. While species richness is the most commonly used measure for plant diversity, the number of evolutionary lineages (i.e. phylogenetic diversity) could theoretically have a stronger influence on the community structure of co-occurring organisms. However, this prediction has only rarely been...

Tree growth is the most important factor in determining the carbon sequestration processes of forest ecosystems. However, the growth phenology (seasonal growth pattern) and responses of tree growth to climatic variables vary considerably among different species, especially between deciduous and evergreen species. Thus, it is crucial to explore the...

Extreme climatic events threaten forests and their climate mitigation potential globally. Understanding the drivers promoting ecosystems stability is therefore considered crucial to mitigate adverse climate change effects on forests. Here, we use structural equation models to explain how tree species richness, asynchronous species dynamics and dive...

Plant and soil microbial diversity are linked through a range of interactions, including the exchange of carbon and nutrients but also herbivory and pathogenic effects. Over time, associations between plant communities and their soil microbiota may strengthen and become more specific, resulting in stronger associations between plant and soil microb...