Bogdan Jaroszewicz

University of Warsaw | UW · Faculty of Biology

There is considerable evidence that biodiversity promotes multiple ecosystem functions (multifunctionality), thus ensuring the delivery of ecosystem services important for human well-being. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship are poorly understood, especially in natural ecosystems. We develop a novel approach to partition biodivers...

Global biodiversity and productivity The relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity has been explored in detail in herbaceous vegetation, but patterns in forests are far less well understood. Liang et al. have amassed a global forest data set from >770,000 sample plots in 44 countries. A positive and consistent relationship can be...

Global biodiversity is affected by numerous environmental drivers. Yet, the extent to which global environmental changes contribute to changes in local diversity is poorly understood. We investigated biodiversity changes in a meta-analysis of 39 resurvey studies in European temperate forests (3988 vegetation records in total, 17-75 years between th...

The faeces of large herbivores include viable seeds of many plant species. With dung decomposition, some seeds migrate into the soil and influence seed bank build-up. However, only a few papers report evidence of this process, and only from grasslands. In forest studies, this subject has so far been neglected. Therefore, I ask in this paper whether...

Many plant species develop fruits to attract animals that will eat them and then disperse the seeds. However, there are many plant species, whose seeds are dispersed endozoochorically, but their fruits are not particularly attractive to animals. The “Foliage is the fruit” (FF) hypothesis proposes that entire biomass of the plant exists to encourage...

Given the enormous global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Canada, and manifold other zoonotic pathogen activity, there is a pressing need for a deeper understanding of the human-animal-environment interface and the intersecting biological, ecological, and societal factors contributing to the emerge...

Ungulate populations are increasing across Europe with important implications for forest plant communities. Concurrently, atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition continues to eutrophicate forests, threatening many rare, often more nutrient-efficient, plant species. These pressures may critically interact to shape biodiversity as in grassland and tundra...

Trees have a large impact on the topsoil chemistry and the strength and direction of this impact depend on the identity of the tree species. Tree species with nutrient-poor litter have the potential to degrade soil fertility, which is characterized by high acidity, low availability of essential nutrients for plant growth, and high levels of availab...

Current climate change aggravates human health hazards posed by heat stress. Forests can locally mitigate this by acting as strong thermal buffers, yet potential mediation by forest ecological characteristics remains underexplored. We report over 14 months of hourly microclimate data from 131 forest plots across four European countries and compare...

Mushrooms play an important role in the maintenance of ecosystem processes and delivering ecosystem services, including food supply. They are also an important source of income for many people worldwide. Thus, understanding which environmental factors influence mushroom productivity is a high practical and scientific priority. We monitored the prod...

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...

Ungulate herbivore populations are increasing across Europe with important implications for forest plant communities. Concurrently, atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition continues to eutrophy forests, threatening many rare plant species. These pressures may critically interact to shape biodiversity as in grassland and tundra systems, yet any potentia...

Forest degradation changes the structural heterogeneity of forests and species communities, with potential consequences for ecosystem functions including seed dispersal by frugivorous animals. While the quantity of seed dispersal may be robust towards forest degradation, changes in the effectiveness of seed dispersal through qualitative changes are...

One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, including those of important and well-studied life forms such as trees, still remain largely unknow...

One of the most fundamental questions in ecology is how many species inhabit the Earth. However, due to massive logistical and financial challenges and taxonomic difficulties connected to the species concept definition, the global numbers of species, including those of important and well-studied life forms such as trees, still remain largely unknow...

Species turnover is ubiquitous. However, it remains unknown whether certain types of species are consistently gained or lost across different habitats. Here, we analysed the trajectories of 1827 plant species over time intervals of up to 78years at 141sites across mountain summits, forests, and lowland grasslands in Europe. We found, albeit with...

Significance Tree diversity is fundamental for forest ecosystem stability and services. However, because of limited available data, estimates of tree diversity at large geographic domains still rely heavily on published lists of species descriptions that are geographically uneven in coverage. These limitations have precluded efforts to generate a g...

Tree species diversity promotes multiple ecosystem functions and services. However, little is known about how above- and belowground resource availability (light, nutrients, and water) and resource uptake capacity mediate tree species diversity effects on aboveground wood productivity and temporal stability of productivity in European forests and w...

Globally, more than 32,000 kilometers of barriers have been built at borders of over 70 countries, to stop human migration. Governments focus on securing their borders, often forgetting the impacts of such installations on nature and biodiversity. Studies of the effects of fencing policies are scarce, but evidence very high effectiveness of border...

W toczonych od wielu lat dyskusjach na temat roli lasów w bilansie węglowym Biosfery wysuwano argumenty odnoszące się do różnych okresów czasu, od dziesięcioleci po tysiąclecia. Teraz perspektywa czasowa, przynajmniej w Europie, została skonkretyzowana do trzech dziesięcioleci. Nie ma już zatem wielkiego znaczenia rozpatrywanie problemu, na ile stu...

Presently, there is an intensive search for fungal endophytes to be used in agriculture for the protection and condition improvement of plants and in medicine. We screened for the presence of endophytes in raspberry, which occurs naturally in the Białowieża Forest. The fungal isolates representative of each morphotype were analysed using the molecu...

Large trees are keystone structures for the functioning and maintenance of the biological diversity of wooded landscapes. Thus, we need a better understanding of large-tree-other-tree interactions and their effects on the diversity and spatial structure of the surrounding trees. We studied these interactions in the core of the Białowieża Primeval F...

Woody species’ requirements and environmental sensitivity change from seedlings to adults, a process referred to as ontogenetic shift. Such shifts can be increased by climate change. To assess the changes in the difference of temperature experienced by seedlings and adults in the context of climate change, it is essential to have reliable climatic...

The inability of small-gaped animals to consume very large fruits may limit seed dispersal of the respective plants. This has often been shown for large-fruited plant species that remain poorly dispersed when large-gaped animal species are lost due to anthropogenic pressure. Little is known about whether gape-size limitations similarly influence se...

Research highlights: shifts in the composition and functional diversity of lichen biota reflect changes in the environment caused by climate warming and eutrophication. Background and objectives: studies on lichen functional diversity and refinement in the functional traits of lichen biota under the pressure of changing environmental factors are cu...

Mutualistic interactions form the basis for many ecological processes and are often analyzed within the framework of ecological networks. These interactions can be sampled with a range of methods and first analyses of pollination networks sampled with different methods showed differences in common network metrics. However, it is yet unknown if metr...

1. Biodiversity experiments have identified both complementarity and selection as important drivers of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, their relative importance in above‐ and belowground ecosystem compartments of mature forests remains yet to be explored. 2. We adopted a trait‐based approach to partition bi...

Current trends emphasize the importance of the examination of the functional composition of lichens, which may provide information on the species realized niche diversity and community assembly processes, thus enabling one to understand the specific adaptations of lichens and their interaction with the environment. We analyzed the distribution and...

Deadwood plays a crucial role in the maintenance of biodiversity in forest ecosystems. Its quantity and quality are commonly used in ecology and nature conservation as a proxy indicator of forest biodiversity. In this study we exposed 720 logs of wood in a full-factorial experiment, set in a temperate European forest, to test the influence of fores...

Achieving sustainable development as an inclusive societal process in rural landscapes, and sustainability in terms of functional green infrastructures for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services, are wicked challenges. Competing claims from various sectors call for evidence-based adaptive collaborative governance. Leveraging such approach...

Context Maintaining functional green infrastructures (GIs) require evidence-based knowledge about historic and current states and trends of representative land cover types. Objectives We address: (1) the long-term loss and transformation of potential natural forest vegetation; (2) the effects of site productivity on permanent forest loss and emerg...

The ability of plants to tolerate freezing limits their geographical distribution. Therefore, winter warming may shift a species’ occurrence northwards and/or to higher altitudes. In Europe, the hemiparasitic vascular plant Viscum album (mistletoe) has two common and widespread subspecies: V. a. ssp. album and V. a. ssp. austriacum. The former has...

Protected areas worldwide are important to maintaining biodiversity and providing recreational opportunities to society. However, many protected areas are affected by unprecedented, large and severe natural disturbances, like bark beetle outbreaks. Due to the contrasting responses of different taxonomic groups to disturbance events and largely nega...

The direction and magnitude of long-term changes in local plant species richness are highly variable among studies, while species turnover is ubiquitous. However, it is unknown whether the nature of species turnover is idiosyncratic or whether certain types of species are consistently gained or lost across different habitats. To address this questi...

The distribution of large ungulates in space is in large extent driven by the availability of forage, which in temperate forests depends on light availability, and associated plant diversity and cover. We hypothesized that the increased number of GPS fixes of European bison (Bison bonasus L.) in usually avoided spruce forests was an effect of highe...

Biological communities accumulate a climatic (thermal) debt when their response to warming does not keep up with the warming rate itself. Forest understory plant communities appear to respond particularly slowly to warming, and thus climatic debts are commonly observed in forest under-story plant communities (1, 2). In line with conventional approa...

Canopy structure and composition are important determinants of spatial and temporal variation in forest microcli-mate (1, 2). Accordingly, we inferred the microclimate from macroclimate data and the modulating effect of the canopy layer [figure 1B in Zellweger et al. (3)]. Bertrand et al. (4) used our data to separately analyze the effects of macro...

Functional diversity is considered an important tool for the identification of ecological mechanisms shaping the coexistence patterns of species communities along different environmental gradients. However, there is a huge gap in knowledge regarding the importance of ecological mechanisms in shaping the composition of lichen communities. We analyze...

Questions Light availability at the forest floor affects many forest ecosystem processes, and is often quantified indirectly through easy‐to‐measure stand characteristics. We investigated how three such characteristics, basal area, canopy cover and canopy closure, were related to each other in structurally complex mixed forests. We also asked how w...

In many terrestrial ecosystems earthworms operate at the interface between plants and soil. As ecosystem engineers, they affect key ecosystem functions such as decomposition, nutrient cycling and bioturbation. Their incidence and abundance depends on several soil properties, yet simultaneously they also impact soil properties themselves. The existe...

The tension between biodiversity conservation and multipurpose forest management may lead to conflicts. An internationally prominent example is the Białowieża Forest Massif (BFM), an extensive forest complex with high levels of naturalness. We apply a systematic, multidisciplinary assessment process to review empirical evidence on different dimensi...

Forest habitats change significantly under the influence of global warming. It is important to predict the effects of these changes, especially in primeval forests which currently represent a small percentage of temperate forests. Such changes often manifest themselves in an acceleration of the frequency of mass seeding of trees, which causes casca...

Local biodiversity trends over time are likely to be decoupled from global trends, as local processes may compensate or counteract global change. We analyze 161 long-term biological time series (15–91 years) collected across Europe, using a comprehensive dataset comprising ~6,200 marine, freshwater and terrestrial taxa. We test whether (i) local lo...

Late-spring frosts (LSFs) affect the performance of plants and animals across the world's temperate and boreal zones, but despite their ecological and economic impact on agriculture and forestry, the geographic distribution and evolutionary impact of these frost events are poorly understood. Here, we analyze LSFs between 1959 and 2017 and the resis...

Biodiversity time series reveal global losses and accelerated redistributions of species, but no net loss in local species richness. To better understand how these patterns are linked, we quantify how individual species trajectories scale up to diversity changes using data from 68 vegetation resurvey studies of seminatural forests in Europe. Herb-l...

Research Highlights: Thermophilous oak forests are among the most species-rich forest ecosystems in Central Europe. In the temperate zone, they evolved from mixed deciduous forests due to centuries-long livestock grazing. The abandonment of traditional forms of landscape use resulted in a constant decline in the number of patches of these communiti...

Local factors restrain forest warming Microclimates are key to understanding how organisms and ecosystems respond to macroclimate change, yet they are frequently neglected when studying biotic responses to global change. Zellweger et al. provide a long-term, continental-scale assessment of the effects of micro- and macroclimate on the community com...

Many studies show the significant impact of direct and indirect human activity on the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, including forests. The increase in the number of invasive species, changes caused by climate change, or eutrophication of habitats resulting from air pollution can irrevocably affect biodiversity, species composition, or spec...

The ability for vegetative growth and development of generative organs often reflects an adaptation to the environment and may be a suitable proxy for understanding population dynamics of rare relict species. An example of such a plant is Carex lachenalii Schkuhr, an arctic‐alpine species, in the temperate zone of Europe only occurring in isolated...

The landscape-scale extinction of a tree species may have a negative impact on diversity of associated epiphytic species. We used ordination and hierarchical clustering methods to assess landscape and the community level effects of reduction in the abundance of European ash Fraxinus excelsior, caused by ash dieback, on the associated epiphytic lich...

1.A central challenge of today's ecological research is predicting how ecosystems will develop under future global change. Accurate predictions are complicated by (i) simultaneous effects of different drivers, such as climate change, nitrogen deposition, and management changes; and (ii) legacy effects from previous land use. 2.We tested whether he...

• Functional traits respond to environmental drivers, hence evaluating trait‐environment relationships across spatial environmental gradients can help to understand how multiple drivers influence plant communities. Global‐change drivers such as changes in atmospheric nitrogen deposition occur worldwide, but affect community trait distributions at t...

The functioning of plant communities is strongly influenced by the number of species in the community and their spatial arrangement. This is because plants interact with their nearest neighbors and this interaction is expected to be stronger when the interacting individuals are ecologically similar in terms of resource use. Recent evidence shows th...

Plant functional diversity (FD) is an important component of biodiversity that characterizes the variability of functional traits within a community, landscape, or even large spatial scales. It can influence ecosystem processes and stability. Hence, it is important to understand how and why FD varies within and between ecosystems, along resources a...

The understorey in temperate forests can play an important functional role, depending on its biomass and functional characteristics. While it is known that local soil and stand characteristics largely determine the biomass of the understorey, less is known about the role of global change. Global change can directly affect understorey biomass, but a...

Białowieża Forest is one of the closest to pristine forest ecosystems in temperate vegetation zone in European Lowland, which is still being transformed by forest management. We investigated the effects of salvage logging of spruce stands killed by bark beetle on the recovery process and the biodiversity of the herb layer in the early stages of veg...

The whole article may be obtained till end of November 2019 free of charge from Fungal Ecology via link https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Zv8C6ExPyWjsN Taxonomy and diversity of symptomatic lichenicolous fungi (visible as fruitbodies on lichen thalli, their discoloration, and/or deformation) and their specificity to lichen hosts is becoming more and...

In Europe only some small isolated patches of forests with a high degree of naturalness still exist. These are forests, whose structure, composition and function has been shaped by natural dynamics without substantial anthropogenic influence over the long period. In this respect, Białowieża Forest is a unique location in Europe, with continuous for...

Aim: Forest understorey microclimates are often buffered against extreme heat or cold, with important implications for the organisms living in these environments. We quantified seasonal effects of understorey microclimate predictors describing canopy structure, canopy composition and topography (i.e., local factors) and the forest patch size and di...

Słowa kluczowe: integralność naukowa, ochrona różnorodności biologicznej, ochrona procesów, lasy naturalne.

2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. In this Letter, the middle initial of author G. J. Nabuurs was omitted, and he should have been associated with an additional affiliation: ‘Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands’ (now added as affiliation 18...