Christoph Scherber

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• Professor
• Professor (Full) at Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change

Plant diversity affects species richness and abundance of taxa at higher trophic levels. However, plant diversity effects on omnivores (feeding on multiple trophic levels) and their trophic and non-trophic interactions are not yet studied because appropriate methods were lacking. A promising approach is the DNA-based analysis of gut contents using...

Ongoing biodiversity decline impairs ecosystem processes, including pollination. Flower visitation, an important indicator of pollination services, is influenced by plant species richness. However, the spatio-temporal responses of different pollinator groups to plant species richness have not yet been analyzed experimentally. Here, we used an exper...

The impact of climate change on herbivorous insects can have far-reaching consequences for ecosystem processes. However, experiments investigating the combined effects of multiple climate change drivers on herbivorous insects are scarce. We independently manipulated three climate change drivers (CO2, warming, drought) in a Danish heathland ecosyste...

Insects are facing an increasingly tough combination of global change drivers such as habitat fragmentation, agricultural intensification, pollution, or climatic changes. While single-factor studies have yielded considerable insights, multi-factor manipulations have gained momentum over the last years. Nevertheless, most written work to date has re...

Biodiversity is rapidly declining, and this may negatively affect ecosystem processes, including economically important ecosystem services. Previous studies have shown that biodiversity has positive effects on organisms and processes across trophic levels. However, only a few studies have so far incorporated an explicit food-web perspective. In an...

Currently, knowledge of arthropod diversity and distributions in terrestrial habitats is limited due to a lack of taxonomists and consistent monitoring, hindering insect conservation efforts. To address this, we conducted an extensive country‐wide study in Germany using a year‐long Malaise trap monitoring effort supported by citizen scientists. Our...

The strength of biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships varies within and across studies, depending on the investigated ecosystem function and diversity facet (e.g., species richness or functional composition), limiting our ability to translate BEF results into recommendations for management and conservation. The variability in BEF r...

Pesticides affect a diverse range of non-target species and may be linked to global biodiversity loss. The magnitude of this hazard remains only partially understood. We present a synthesis of pesticide (insecticide, herbicide and fungicide) impacts on multiple non-target organisms across trophic levels based on 20,212 effect sizes from 1,705 studi...

Freshwater ponds host diverse arthropod communities, but conservation frameworks are scarce. Heterogeneous pond mosaics of various sizes and successional stages can develop during raw material extraction in mining sites, acting as refugia for a variety of species. Here, we investigate arthropod diversity and conservation status across lakes and pon...

Species diversity and morphological disparity are often linked, especially in lineages with evolutionary success. For invertebrates, their relation is poorly investigated, particularly under various ecochorological scales. Here, we explore thirteen assemblages of phytophagous scarab beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) in Sri Lanka and infer patterns...

Understanding insect behaviour and its underlying drivers is vital for interpreting changes in local biodiversity and predicting future trends. Conventional insect traps are typically limited to assess the composition of local insect communities over longer time periods and provide only limited insights into the effects of abiotic factors, such as...

Biodiversity monitoring increasingly relies on molecular methods such as eDNA metabarcoding. However, sound applications have so far been only established for a limited number of taxonomic groups. More information on the strengths and weaknesses of eDNA methods, especially for poorly covered groups, is essential for practical applications to achiev...

Field monitoring plays a crucial role in understanding insect dynamics within ecosystems. It facilitates pest distribution assessment, control measure evaluation, and prediction of pest outbreaks. Additionally, it provides important information on bioindicators with which the state of biodiversity and ecological integrity in specific habitats and e...

Humanity depends on agriculture for food, fiber and energy provisioning, but input-intensive agricultural production is impacting ecosystem services such as pollination. Pollution effects from neonicotinoid insecticides on pollinators receive much attention, but nothing is known on the synergistic effects with emerging plastic contaminants and the...

Agricultural simplification continues to expand at the expense of more diverse forms of agriculture. This simplification, for example, in the form of intensively managed monocultures, poses a risk to keeping the world within safe and just Earth system boundaries. Here, we estimated how agricultural diversification simultaneously affects social and...

Field monitoring plays a crucial role in understanding insect dynamics within ecosystems. It facilitates pest distribution assessment, control measure evaluation, and prediction of pest outbreaks. Additionally, it provides important information on bioindicators with which the state of biodiversity and ecological integrity in specific habitats and e...

"There are no scientifically justified obstacles to protecting biodiversity in all its beauty and diversity. There are only six years left to achieve the biodiversity targets by 2030. We must work together now to get there in time." In the 10 Must Knows from Biodiversity Science 2024, 64 scientists have further developed their well-founded and div...

Background. Taxonomic identification through DNA barcodes gained considerable traction through the invention of next-generation sequencing and DNA metabar-coding. Metabarcoding allows for the simultaneous identification of thousands of organisms from bulk samples with high taxonomic resolution. However, reliable identifications can only be achieved...

The diversity-productivity relationship predicts a positive effect of plant species richness on primary productivity. One key mechanism predicted to underlie this relationship is the effect of plant diversity on the suppression of plant antagonists, including invertebrate herbivores, plant diseases, antagonistic plants in an agricultural context (i...

Das in Nordrhein-Westfalen durch den Entomologischen Verein Krefeld (EVK) durchgeführte Monitoring der Biodiversität flugaktiver Insekten ist bundesweit wegweisend. Es wurde an Untersuchungsstandorten innerhalb der Kulisse der Ökologischen Flächenstichprobe NRW sowie in verschiedenen Schutzgebieten durchgeführt. Damit sind sowohl Flächen mit hoher...

The decline of insect abundance and richness has been documented for decades and has received increased attention in recent years. In 2017, a study by Hallmann and colleagues on insect biomasses in German nature protected areas received a great deal of attention and provided the impetus for the creation of the project Diversity of Insects in Nature...

Schon im Jahr 2014 hat das LANUV Untersuchungen des Entomologischen Vereins Krefeld gefördert, um die Biomasse flugaktiver Insekten in verschiedenen Schutzgebieten zu erheben. Diese Daten flossen auch in die Publikation zu Rückgängen der Insektenbiomassen ein (Hallmann et al. 2017). In der Folge hat das LANUV ein groß angelegtes Projekt unterstützt...

Recent biodiversity declines require action across sectors such as agriculture. The situation is particularly acute for arthropods, a species‐rich taxon providing important ecosystem services. To counteract the negative consequences of agricultural intensification, creating a less hostile agricultural ‘matrix’ through growing crop mixtures can redu...

Anthropogenic global warming has major implications for mobile terrestrial insects, including long-term effects from constant warming, for example, on species distribution patterns, and short-term effects from heat extremes that induce immediate physiological responses. To cope with heat extremes, they either have to reduce their activity or move t...

Although intended to control pests, pesticides affect a phylogenetically diverse range of non-target species contributing to global biodiversity declines 1–7 . However, the magnitude of this risk is only partly understood. Here, we show that pesticides negatively affect non-target organisms across the tree of life. We analyzed 26,096 effect sizes f...

Intraspecific genetic diversity is an important component of biodiversity. A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated positive effects of plant genetic diversity on plant performance. However, it has remained unclear whether plant genetic diversity generally increases plant performance by reducing the pressure of plant antagonists across troph...

Urbanization is affecting arthropod communities worldwide, for example by changing the availability of food resources. However, the strength and direction of a community's response is species‐specific and depends on species’ trophic level. Here, we investigated interacting species at different trophic levels in nests of cavity‐nesting bees and wasp...

In recent years, the decline of insect biodiversity and the imminent loss of provided ecosystem functions and services has received public attention and raised the demand for political action. The complex, multi-causal contributors to insect decline require a broad interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach that addresses ecological and social a...

Intraspecific genetic diversity is an important component of biodiversity. A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated positive effects of plant genetic diversity on plant performance. However, it has remained unclear whether plant genetic diversity generally increases plant performance by reducing the pressure of plant antagonists across troph...

Lipids are biomolecules with essential roles in metabolic processes, signaling, and cel-lular architecture. In this study, we investigated changes in the lipidome of the house cricket Acheta domesticus subjected to diets of different nutritional composition (i.e., protein to carbohydrate ratio) and two distinct social environments (i.e., solitary o...

Intensive agriculture is increasingly taking its toll, and in many land use systems we are losing biodiversity at a breathtaking rate. What can be done to halt this biodiversity loss? What are the most promising strategies for promoting biodiversity in agroecosystems? This Special Issue presents a wide range of approaches to agroecosystem diversifi...

Recent biodiversity declines require action across sectors such as agriculture. The situation is particularly acute for arthropods, a species-rich taxon providing important ecosystem services. To counteract negative consequences of agricultural intensification, creating a less hostile agricultural “matrix” through growing crop mixtures can reduce h...

Semi-natural habitats (SNHs) are becoming increasingly scarce in modern agricultural landscapes. This may reduce natural ecosystem services such as pest control with its putatively positive effect on crop production. In agreement with other studies, we recently reported wheat yield reductions at field borders which were linked to the type of SNH an...

Intraspecific diversity (genetic diversity) is an important component of biodiversity. A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated positive direct or indirect effects of plant genetic diversity on plant performance. However, it has remained unclear whether plant genetic diversity increases plant performance by reducing the pressure of plant-dam...

The relevance of intercropping, where two or more crop species are simultaneously grown on the same land space, is growing due to its potential for improving resource use and maintaining stable yields under variable weather conditions. However, the actual growth of intercropped species may differ resulting from the idiosyncratic effect of crop dive...

We present a unique data set of trait information for 586 insect families in Central Europe, covering the largest known part of described species (over 34,000 species). Life history information and major functional traits were evaluated with fuzzy coding and weighted according to the number of known species in Germany. An overall analysis of the Ge...

Rapid changes of the biosphere observed in recent years are caused by both small and large scale drivers, like shifts in temperature, transformations in land-use, or changes in the energy budget of systems. While the latter processes are easily quantifiable, documentation of the loss of biodiversity and community structure is more difficult. Change...

Soil degradation is an exceedance of the capacity and resiliency of soil for providing functions and ecosystem services. It is a complex ongoing phenomenon threatening humans’ livelihoods and our future on earth. Knowledge gain can help to find solutions for monitoring, preventing and combating soil degradation. In this chapter we address the essen...

Stabilizing agricultural production is fundamental to food security. At the national level, increasing the effective diversity of cultivated crops has been found to increase temporal production stability, i.e., the year-to-year stability of total caloric production of all crops combined. Here, we specifically investigated these effects at the regio...

Metacommunity ecology currently lacks a consistent functional trait perspective across trophic levels. To foster new cross‐taxa experiments and field studies, we present hypotheses on how three trait dimensions change along gradients of density of individuals, resource supply and habitat isolation. The movement dimension refers to the ability to mo...

Semi-natural habitats (SNHs) are becoming increasingly scarce in modern agricultural landscapes. This may reduce natural ecosystem services such as pest control with its putatively positive effect on crop production. In agreement with other studies, we recently reported wheat yield reductions at field borders which were linked to the type of SNH an...

Due to the multiplicity of challenges facing all societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, agricultural systems and rural landscapes are under pressure. Solutions for their optimization towards sustainability at high productivity are required. We address the majority of current agricultural systems and discuss approaches for assessing...

Most vegetated land on earth has been used for agriculture for hundreds of years, shaping the land’s features and functions. Agricultural (rural) landscapes are the basis for feeding the global population and meeting their many other demands. In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, agriculture is facing some crucial challenges: feeding...

Reports on recent declines in insect biodiversity have prompted discussions on how to assess insect species numbers across a wide range of different habitats and on large spatial scales. Previous approaches were often restricted to particular habitat types (such as calcareous grasslands) or taxa (such as butterflies). Here, we show that setting up...

Fueled by debates on the causes and consequences of biodiversity decline worldwide, many countries are now employing biodiversity monitoring programs of various scope, intensity and scale. While these programs will be important to set a baseline for managing a country´s biological diversity, the availability of detailed data may take too long for t...

Rearing conditions may elicit noticeable plastic responses in life-history traits of living organisms. Diet composition and the social environment have proven to influence prominent traits such as survival, body size, fecundity, and life span. Nevertheless, the physiological mechanisms underlying such responses are largely unknown. In this study, w...

The intercropping of two or more crop species on the same piece of land at a given time has been hypothesized to enhance crop yield stability. To address this hypothesis, we assessed the grain yield stability of various barley-pea and wheat-faba bean mixtures grown in seven experimental field trials (locations) across Europe during two years with c...

In agroecosystems, temporal diversification creates a sequence of short-lived habitats through time. Crop species as well as the diversity of crops grown in sequence might affect soil biodiversity and nutrient cycling processes. In the present study, we focused on a long-term crop rotation established in 2006 in Lower Saxony, Germany on a Luvisol....

Cereal-legume intercropping can increase yields, reduce fertilizer input and improve soil quality compared with pure culture. Designing intercropping systems requires the integration of plant species trait selection with choice of crop configuration and management. Crop growth models can facilitate the understanding and prediction of the interactio...

Arthropod diversity of different taxonomic groups and ecosystem services are declining, yet current measures to counteract losses are often restricted to small areas of land or field margins, particularly in agricultural systems. At the same time, large areas of land will be required to feed a growing global population. Intercropping has been propo...

Growing two or more plant species in close proximity (‘plant teams’) is a practice that can be adopted to improve crop production in terms of increased productivity, more efficient resource use, reduced reliance on crop protection chemicals, and biodiversity enhancement. Here, we summarise findings from experimental trials conducted across Europe t...

Bats play an important role as top-down predators of insect populations but are threatened by a variety of factors, including the loss of foraging habitat and insect declines. Knowledge on trophic interactions, foraging strategies, and hunting areas is key to understanding the ecology of bat species, to assess their impact on ecosystems and to opti...

Bats play an important role as predators of insect populations but are threatened by a variety of factors, including the loss of foraging habitat and insect declines. Knowledge on trophic interactions, foraging strategies, and hunting areas is key to understanding the ecology of bat species, to assess their impact on ecosystems and to optimize cons...

Measuring habitat specialisation is pivotal for predicting species extinctions and for understanding consequences on ecosystem functioning. Here, we sampled pollinator and natural enemy communities in all major habitat types occurring across multiple agricultural landscapes and used species-habitat networks to determine how habitat specialisation c...

Arthropod herbivores cause substantial economic costs that drive an increasing need to develop environmentally sustainable approaches to herbivore control. Increasing plant diversity is expected to limit herbivory by altering plant-herbivore and predator-herbivore interactions, but the simultaneous influence of these interactions on herbivore impac...

Earth is home to over 350,000 vascular plant species that differ in their traits in innumerable ways. A key challenge is to pre- dict how natural or anthropogenically driven changes in the identity, abundance and diversity of co-occurring plant species drive important ecosystem-level properties such as biomass production or carbon storage. Here, we...

In this study, we used two common ant species (Lasius niger and Lasius neoniger ) to assay how they translate variation in the diet (both in composition and frequency) into growth. We measured colony development for over 8 months and measured several phenotypic traits of the worker caste, and examined whether forager preference corresponded with di...

Widespread application of synthetic pesticides and loss of plant diversity are regarded as significant drivers of current global change. The effects of such phenomena on insect performance have been extensively studied separately, yet the interactions of these two drivers have been poorly explored. Here, we subjected the polyphagous grasshopper Pse...

Nutrition is the single most important factor for individual's growth and reproduction. Consequently, the inability to reach the nutritional optimum imposes severe consequences for animal fitness. Yet, under natural conditions, organisms may face a mixture of stressors that can modulate the effects of nutritional asymmetry. For instance, stressful...

The continuing loss of global biodiversity has raised questions about the risk that species extinctions pose for the functioning of natural ecosystems and the services that they provide for human wellbeing. There is consensus that, on single trophic levels, biodiversity sustains functions; however, to understand the full range of biodiversity effec...

Urbanization affects pollinator diversity and plant–pollinator networks by changing resource availability locally and in the surrounding landscape. We experimentally established (N = 12) standardized plant communities in farmland, villages, and cities to identify the relative role of local and landscape effects on plant–pollinator communities along...

Natural landscape elements (NLEs) in agricultural landscapes contribute to biodiversity and ecosystem services, but are also regarded as an obstacle for large‐scale agricultural production. However, the effects of NLEs on crop yield have rarely been measured. Here, we investigated how different bordering structures, such as agricultural roads, fiel...

Käfer und Fliegen auf den Dunghaufen der Weidetiere zeigen an, wie intakt oder geschädigt ein Agrarsystem ist. Oft leidet die Artenvielfalt unter dem Einsatz von zu viel Kunst- und tierischem Dünger.

Earth is home to over 350,000 vascular plant species ¹ that differ in their traits in innumerable ways. Yet, a handful of functional traits can help explaining major differences among species in photosynthetic rate, growth rate, reproductive output and other aspects of plant performance 2–6 . A key challenge, coined “the Holy Grail” in ecology, is...

In this paper, we discuss the effects of crop type and temporal diversification on arthropods in a long-term crop-rotation experiment.

Natural landscape elements (NLEs) in agricultural landscapes contribute to biodiversity and ecosystem services, but are also regarded as an obstacle for large‐scale agricultural production. However, the effects of NLEs on crop yield have rarely been measured. Here, we investigated how different bordering structures, such as agricultural roads, fiel...

Agricultural landscapes are globally dominated by monocultures under intensive management. This is one of the main reasons for biodiversity loss and insect population decline in many regions all over the world. Agroecosystem biodiversity in these areas can be enhanced by cropping system diversification, such as crop rotations. Yet, long‐term studie...

Context Biodiversity monitoring programs require fast, reliable and cost-effective methods for biodiversity assessment in landscapes. Sampling pollinators across entire landscapes is challenging, as trapping needs to cover many habitat types. Objectives We developed and tested a landscape-wide sampling design for pollinators. We assessed the predi...

Context Global change pressures (GCPs) imperil species and associated ecosystem functions, but studies investigating interactions of landscape-scale pressures remain scarce. Loss of species-rich habitat and agricultural expansion are major threats for biodiversity, but if or how these factors interactively determine community-level shifts and conse...

Mehr als 80 % der Fläche Deutschlands wird entweder landwirtschaftlich genutzt oder ist von Wald bedeckt. Daten zur Vielfalt und zum Rückgang von Insekten liegen jedoch bisher vor allem aus Schutzgebieten und extensiv genutzten Bereichen vor. Im vorliegenden Beitrag stellen wir die Ergebnisse zahlreicher Untersuchungen zur Vielfalt und zu den Ökosy...

Human activities are causing major changes in biological communities worldwide. Due to concern about the consequences of these changes, an academic conversation about biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) has emerged over the last few decades. Here we use a keyword co-occurrence analysis to characterize and review 28 years of research focuse...

Concern about the functional consequences of unprecedented loss in biodiversity has prompted biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research to become one of the most active fields of ecological research in the past 25 years. Hundreds of experiments have manipulated biodiversity as an independent variable and found compelling support that the fun...