Dylan Craven

Dylan Craven
Universidad Mayor · Centro de Genómica, Ecología y Medio Ambiente (GEMA), Universidad Mayor

M.F.S., Ph.D.

About

139
Publications
127,734
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Introduction
My research is focused on drivers and consequences of biodiversity across temporal and spatial scales.
Additional affiliations
April 2018 - July 2019
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Position
  • PostDoc Position
September 2016 - March 2018
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Position
  • PostDoc Position
July 2013 - September 2016
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Education
September 2007 - December 2012
Yale University
Field of study
  • Trait-based community ecology
September 2004 - May 2006
Yale University
Field of study
  • Tropical eco-physiology & restoration ecology
September 1996 - May 2000
University of Virginia
Field of study
  • Foreign Affairs, Spanish

Publications

Publications (139)
Article
Full-text available
Globally, biological invasions can have strong impacts on biodiversity as well as ecosystem functioning. While less conspicuous than introduced aboveground organisms, introduced belowground organisms may have similarly strong effects. Here, we synthesize for the first time the impacts of introduced earthworms on plant diversity and community compos...
Article
Full-text available
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 equatio...
Article
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Biodiversity patterns emerge as a consequence of evolutionary and ecological processes. Their relative importance is frequently tested on model ecosystems such as oceanic islands that vary in both. However, the coarse-scale data typically used in biogeo- graphic studies have limited inferential power to separate the effects of historical biogeograp...
Article
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Aim Biodiversity and ecosystem productivity vary across the globe, and considerable effort has been made to describe their relationships. Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research has traditionally focused on how experimentally controlled species richness affects net primary productivity (S → NPP) at small spatial grains. In contrast, the inf...
Article
Motivation Due to language and networking barriers, global initiatives to compile trait data often fail to integrate data from sources in non-English languages or scientists that largely speak and write in non-English languages. To illustrate the potential for regional databases to fill gaps in trait data, and how such databases may fill critical g...
Preprint
Full-text available
Water availability is widely recognized for its importance in shaping plant diversity gradients globally. However, even in arid ecosystems such as drylands, a remarkable diversity of plant species can persist. Yet, the environmental, topographic, and geographic drivers that have structured plant diversity gradients within drylands over evolutionary...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Understanding the mechanisms promoting resilience in plant communities is crucial in times of increasing disturbance and global environmental change. Here, we present the first meta‐analysis evaluating the relationship between functional diversity and resilience of plant communities. Specifically, we tested whether the resilience of plant commu...
Preprint
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1) Herbivores shape multiple facets of biodiversity patterns and ecosystem processes, yet are increasingly threatened by habitat loss and climate change. Here, we use a long-term experiment to examine how excluding herbivores, a proxy for biodiversity loss, restructures dominant plant ecological strategies within and across species. 2) We measured...
Preprint
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Globally, droughts are becoming longer, more frequent and more severe, and their impacts are multidimensional. The impacts of droughts typically extend beyond the water balance as they accumulate over time, and can lead to regime shifts in land use. Here, we assess the effects of temporal changes in water supply and demand on vegetation productivit...
Article
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Aim Successional changes in functional diversity provide insights into community assembly by indicating how species are filtered into local communities based on their traits. Here, we assess successional changes in taxonomic and functional richness, evenness and redundancy along gradients of climate, soil pH and forest cover. Location Neotropics....
Preprint
Large scale reforestation is promoted as an important strategy to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss. A persistent challenge for efforts to restore ecosystems at scale is how to accelerate ecological processes, particularly natural regeneration. Yet, despite being recognized as an important barrier to the recovery of diverse plant commun...
Article
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Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies—combinations of growth, mortality and recruitm...
Article
Full-text available
Carbohydrate reserves play a vital role in plant survival during periods of negative carbon balance. Under a carbon-limited scenario, we expect a trade-offs between carbon allocation to growth, reserves, and defense. A resulting hypothesis is that carbon allocation to reserves exhibits a coordinated variation with functional traits associated with...
Article
Full-text available
Effects of plant diversity on grassland productivity, or overyielding, are found to be robust to nutrient enrichment. However, the impact of cumulative nitrogen (N) addition (total N added over time) on overyielding and its drivers are underexplored. Synthesizing data from 15 multi-year grassland biodiversity experiments with N addition, we found t...
Article
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Plant diversity effects on community productivity often increase over time. Whether the strengthening of diversity effects is caused by temporal shifts in species-level overyielding (i.e., higher species-level productivity in diverse communities compared with monocultures) remains unclear. Here, using data from 65 grassland and forest biodiversity...
Article
Full-text available
Among the most important impacts of biological invasions on biodiversity is biotic homogenization, which may further compromise key ecosystem processes. However, the extent to which they homogenize functional diversity and shift dominant ecological strategies of invaded communities remains uncertain. Here, we investigated changes in plant communiti...
Article
Background Treeline ecotones of Mediterranean ecoregions have been affected by the increasing intensity and severity of droughts. Even though the effect of droughts on forest dynamics has been widely documented, knowledge is relatively scarce of how extreme climate episodes affect the hydraulic structure and, therefore, the physiology of woody plan...
Article
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Biotic and abiotic conditions have been found to strongly influence how biodiversity affects ecosystem functioning in forests. This context dependency of biodiversity‐productivity relationships in real‐world ecosystems may be shaped by the biogeographic context via deep‐time processes acting on the size and composition of the species pool such as d...
Article
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The core principle shared by most theories and models of succession is that, following a major disturbance, plant–environment feedback dynamics drive a directional change in the plant community. The most commonly studied feedback loops are those in which the regrowth of the plant community causes changes to the abiotic (e.g. soil nutrients) or biot...
Article
Aim Evaluate the temporal changes in species diversity, composition, and structure of ephemeral plant communities and the seed bank in response to long‐term herbivore exclusion over 11 years in plots with and without herbivores. Location North‐central Chile. Methods We obtained information on ephemeral vegetation cover in August and September usi...
Poster
Full-text available
Los rasgos de plantas proporcionan información detallada sobre la adaptación de especies y sus interacciones con factores ambientales, permitiendo determinar el desempeño de la vegetación ante el cambio climático. Estos datos se utilizan como indicadores de procesos ecosistémicos, tanto en ecología clásica como en teledetección. Los análisis biblio...
Preprint
Full-text available
The core principle shared by most theories and models of succession is that plant-environment (PE) feedback dynamics drive a directional change in the plant community, following a major disturbance. The most commonly studied feedback loops are those in which the regrowth of the plant community causes changes to the biotic (e.g., dispersers) or abio...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim: Growing evidence suggests that impacts of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning and nature's contributions to people are usually negative, yet the magnitude and direction of these impacts can be variable across naturally-assembled ecosystems. A potential driver of variation in diversity-productivity relationships is the biogeographical co...
Article
Full-text available
Oceanic island floras are well known for their morphological peculiarities and exhibit striking examples of trait evolution1–3. These morphological shifts are commonly attributed to insularity and are thought to be shaped by the biogeographical processes and evolutionary histories of oceanic islands2,4. However, the mechanisms through which biogeog...
Preprint
Full-text available
Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role for carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies (combinations of growth, mortality and recrui...
Article
Full-text available
In the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration¹, large knowledge gaps persist on how to increase biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in cash crop-dominated tropical landscapes². Here, we present findings from a large-scale, 5-year ecosystem restoration experiment in an oil palm landscape enriched with 52 tree islands, encompassing assessm...
Article
We performed a systematic review of the scientific literature on the coastal lomas, and discuss their origin, fog dependence, biodiversity patterns, and conservation. Coastal lomas are isolated vegetation oases, found from northern Peru (7 • S) to central Chile (30 • S), that depend entirely on marine fog, occurring in the Peruvian and Chilean Dese...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Tropical forest succession and associated changes in community composition are driven by species demographic rates, but how demographic strategies shift during succession remains unclear. Our goal was to identify generalities in demographic trade‐offs and successional shifts in demographic strategies across Neotropical forests that cover a larg...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ecosystem stability reveals how ecosystems respond to global change over time. Yet, the focus of past research on small spatial grains and extents overlooks scale dependence and how broad-scale environmental gradients shape stability. Here, we use forest inventory data covering a broad latitudinal gradient from the temperate to the tropical zone to...
Article
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Here we provide the ‘Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset’, containing species mean values for six vascular plant traits. Together, these traits –plant height, stem specific density, leaf area, leaf mass per area, leaf nitrogen content per dry mass, and diaspore (seed or spore) mass – define the primary axes of variation in plant form...
Article
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Both gradual and extreme weather changes trigger complex ecological responses in river ecosystems. It is still unclear to what extent trend or event effects alter biodiversity and functioning in river ecosystems, adding considerable uncertainty to predictions of their future dynamics. Using a comprehensive database of 71 published studies, we show...
Article
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Abstract Understanding the phytochemical landscapes of essential and nonessential chemical elements to plants provides an opportunity to better link biogeochemical cycles to trophic ecology. We investigated the formation and regulation of the cationic phytochemical landscapes of four key elements for biota: Ca, Mg, K, and Na. We collected abovegrou...
Article
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Islands are hotspots of plant endemism and are particularly vulnerable to the establishment (naturalization) of alien plant species. Naturalized species richness on islands depends on several biogeographical and socioeconomic factors, but especially on remoteness. One potential explanation for this is that the phylogenetically imbalanced compositio...
Article
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Forests that regrow naturally on abandoned fields are important for restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services, but can they also preserve the distinct regional tree floras? Using the floristic composition of 1215 early successional forests (≤20 years) in 75 human-modified landscapes across the Neotropic realm, we identified 14 distinct floristi...
Article
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Variation in leaf functional traits along environmental gradients can reveal how vascular epiphytes respond to broad‐ and small‐scale environmental gradients. Along elevational gradients, both temperature and precipitation likely play an important role as drivers of leaf trait variation, but these traits may also respond to small‐scale changes in l...
Preprint
Full-text available
The same features that generate biodiversity patterns across and within oceanic islands over evolutionary time - interactions between isolation, area, and heterogeneity - also influence their vulnerability to biological invasions. Here, we identify the factors that shape the richness and abundance of woody aliens in forest communities across the Ha...
Preprint
Tropical forest succession and associated changes in community composition are driven by species’ demographic rates, but how demographic strategies shift during succession remains unclear. To identify generalities in demographic trade-offs and successional shifts in demographic strategies, we quantified demographic rates of 787 tree species from tw...
Preprint
Full-text available
Oceanic island floras are well-known for their morphological peculiarities and exhibit striking examples of trait evolution. These morphological shifts are commonly attributed to insularity and thought to be shaped by biogeographical processes and evolutionary histories of oceanic islands. However, the mechanisms through which biogeography and evol...
Article
Full-text available
Aim How tree taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity vary with elevation at multiple spatial scales may provide new insights into the ecological and evolutionary processes influencing biogeographical patterns. The effect of water‐ and energy‐related climatic variables on forests diversity across elevations, as well as how clades have evolved on and es...
Article
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Aim Soil microorganisms are essential for the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Although soil microbial communities and functions are linked to tree species composition and diversity, there has been no comprehensive study of the generality or context dependence of these relationships. Here, we examine tree diversity–soil microbial biomass and...
Article
Full-text available
Resilient secondary tropical forests? Although deforestation is rampant across the tropics, forest has a strong capacity to regrow on abandoned lands. These “secondary” forests may increasingly play important roles in biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and landscape restoration. Poorter et al . analyzed the patterns of recovery i...
Article
Significance Tropical forests disappear rapidly through deforestation but also have the potential to regrow naturally through a process called secondary succession. To advance successional theory, it is essential to understand how these secondary forests and their assembly vary across broad spatial scales. We do so by synthesizing continental-scale...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Poster
El rol de los herbívoros en el control de la riqueza de especies vegetales es un tema critico en la conservación. Diferentes investigaciones demuestran que los herbívoros aumentan la diversidad de las plantas, pero no necesariamente modifican la riqueza del banco de semillas del suelo, dependiendo de las condiciones ambientales. El objetivo de este...
Article
Full-text available
This data paper describes a new, comprehensive database (BIOVERA-Epi) on species distributions and leaf functional traits of vascular epiphytes, a poorly studied plant group, along gradients of elevation and forest-use intensity in the central part of Veracruz State, Mexico. The distribution data include frequencies of 271 vascular epiphyte species...
Article
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Here, we describe BIOVERA-Tree, a database on tree diversity, community composition, forest structure and functional traits collected in 120 forest plots, distributed along an extensive elevational gradient in Veracruz State, Mexico. BIOVERA-Tree includes information on forest structure from three levels of forest-use intensity, namely old-growth,...
Article
Full-text available
Soil respiration plays a central role in global carbon dynamics, and small changes in the magnitude of soil respiration could have large impacts on atmospheric CO 2 concentrations. Heterotrophic soil respiration mainly comes from microbial mineralization of soil organic matter and decomposition of plant litter, yet only a few studies have addressed...
Preprint
Full-text available
This data paper describes a new, comprehensive database (BIOVERA-Epi) on species distributions and leaf functional traits of vascular epiphytes, a poorly studied plant group, along gradients of elevation and forest-use intensity in the central part of Veracruz State, Mexico. The distribution data includes frequencies of 271 vascular epiphyte specie...
Article
Full-text available
The Pacific Region has the highest density of naturalised plant species worldwide, which makes it an important area for research on the ecology, evolution and biogeography of biological invasions. While different data sources on naturalised plant species exist for the Pacific, there is no taxonomically and spatially harmonised database available fo...
Article
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Change and intensification of forest use alter tropical ecosystems, influencing biodiversity and, subsequently, ecosystem functioning. The implications of eroding biodiversity may go beyond decreases in species diversity, resulting in changes of functional diversity, that is, the diversity of ecological strategies present in the community, and func...
Article
Full-text available
Identifying generalisable processes that underpin population dynamics is crucial for understanding successional patterns. While longitudinal or chronosequence data are powerful tools for doing so, the traditional focus on community-level shifts in taxonomic and functional composition rather than species-level trait–demography relationships has made...
Preprint
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Background: Secondary foundation species (FS) are organisms that inhabit ecosystems structurally defined by a primary foundation species, providing additional structure to habitats and communities. Trash-basket epiphytes (TBE) are secondary FS that enhance arboreal soil accumulation, providing shelter to animals, and rooting sites for plants. While...
Preprint
Full-text available
Here, we describe BIOVERA-Tree, a database on tree diversity, community composition, forest structure, and functional traits collected in 120 forest plots distributed along an extensive elevational gradient in Veracruz State, Mexico. BIOVERA-Tree includes information on forest structure from three levels of forest-use intensity, namely old-growth,...
Article
Full-text available
1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence-based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...
Article
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Questions Islands harbor a disproportionate amount of global plant diversity, yet their unique native assemblages are particularly vulnerable to biological invasions. It is therefore critical to identify the macroecological constraints that mediate spatial distributions of alien species on islands. Here, we examined abundance‐occupancy relationship...
Article
Full-text available
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, that is, reduced species turnover across space (β d...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background and Aims Carbohydrate reserves play a vital role in plant survival during periods of negative carbon balance. Considering active storage of reserves, there is a trade-off between carbon allocation to growth and to reserves and defense. A resulting hypothesis is that allocation to reserves exhibits a coordinated variation with functional...
Article
Full-text available
Aims Trees dominate the biomass in many ecosystems and are essential for ecosystem functioning and human well‐being. They are also one of the best studied functional groups of plants, with vast amounts of biodiversity data available in scattered sources. We here aim to illustrate that an efficient integration of this data could produce a more holis...