Florian D. Schneider

• Dr. rer. nat.
• Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at Institute for Social-Ecological Research

Organismal functional strategies form a continuum from slow- to fast-growing organisms, in response to common drivers such as resource availability and disturbance. However, whether there is synchronisation of these strategies at the entire community level is unclear. Here, we combine trait data for >2800 above- and belowground taxa from 14 trophic...

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...

Across the tree of life, organismal functional strategies form a continuum from slow-to fast-growing organisms, in response to common drivers such as resource availability and disturbance. However, the synchronization of these strategies at the entire community level is untested. We combine trait data for >2800 above-and belowground taxa from 14 tr...

Die Anwendung von Go-Along-Interviews ermöglicht einen integrierten Methodenmix, bei dem qualitative Interviews mit teilnehmender Beobachtung kombiniert werden, um die analytische Verknüpfung von Diskursen und Praktiken zu erleichtern. Ihre besondere Sensitivität für die räumliche Einbettung und Reflexion sozialer Prozesse wurde in diversen Forschu...

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...

Insect declines and biodiversity loss have attracted much attention in recent years, but lack of comprehensive data, conflicting interests among stakeholders and insufficient policy guidance hinder progress in preserving biodiversity. The project DINA (Diversity of Insects in Nature protected Areas) investigates insect communities in 21 nature rese...

Dryland ecosystems are likely to respond discontinuously to gradual changes in environmental conditions. Direct facilitation between plants, whereby plants improve the local environmental conditions for others, has been shown to be a mechanism contributing to these discontinuous ecosystem transitions. Theoretical models describing dryland vegetatio...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The 2nd affiliation of Sonia Kéfi was missing

Non-technical summary Investing in stricter biodiversity conservation and wildlife protection to reduce the number of emerging diseases and, consequently, the risk of pandemics such as coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), must integrate a social-ecological perspective. Biodiversity conservation, in order to be effective as disease prevention, require...

Konzeptpapier für eine vertikale Begrünung mit Moosen im Citytunnel der Stadt Darmstadt zur Reduzierung von Luftschadstoffen

Beitrag zum Blog „Soziale Ökologie. Krise – Kritik – Gestaltung“ des ISOE – Institut für sozial-ökologische Forschung https://isoe.blog/praevention-von-zoonosen-durch-biodiversitaetsschutz-eine-sozial-oekologische-aufgabe/ COVID-19 hat seinen Ursprung in wildlebenden Tieren und konnte sehr wahrscheinlich im Zusammenhang mit Wildtierhandel auf den...

One of the most challenging issues in Mediterranean ecosystems to date has been to understand the emergence of discontinuous changes or catastrophic shifts. In the era of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, which encompass ideas around Land Degradation Neutrality, advancing this understanding has become even more critical and urgent. The aim of...

Der wissenschaftliche Befund eines flächenhaften Insektenrückgangs hat eine ge-sellschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit den Ursachen und Handlungsmöglichkeiten, insbesondere in der landwirtschaftlichen Praxis, ausgelöst. Diese Studie arbeitet die zentralen Themenstränge im Diskurs um den Insektenschutz in der agrarischen Kultur-landschaft Deutschland...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Synthesizing trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Species traits are widely used in ecological and evolutionary science, and new data and methods have proliferated rapidly. Yet accessing and integrating disparate data sources remains a considerable challenge, slowing progress t...

Trait‐based approaches are widespread throughout ecological research as they offer great potential to achieve a general understanding of a wide range of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms. Accordingly, a wealth of trait data is available for many organism groups, but this data is underexploited due to a lack of standardization and heterogeneity...

Trait-based research spans from evolutionary studies of individual-level properties to global patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. An increasing number of trait data is available for many different organism groups, published as open access data on a variety of file hosting services. Thus, standardization between datasets is generally...

Synthesising trait observations and knowledge across the Tree of Life remains a grand challenge for biodiversity science. Despite the well-recognised importance of traits for addressing ecological and evolutionary questions, trait-based approaches still struggle with several basic data requirements to deliver openly accessible, reproducible, and tr...

Data on a series of laboratory feeding experiments with ground beetles, cursorial spiders and centipedes of different sizes as predators. Each trial contained one predator individual and varying densities of a single prey species of different body sizes.

Some ecosystems show nonlinear responses to gradual changes in environmental conditions, once a threshold in conditions—or critical point—is passed. This can lead to wide shifts in ecosystem states, possibly with dramatic ecological and economic consequences. Such behaviours have been reported in drylands, savannas, coral reefs or shallow lakes for...

1. Trait-based approaches are widespread throughout ecological research, offering great potential for trait data to deliver general and mechanistic conclusions. Accordingly, a wealth of trait data is available for many organism groups, but, due to a lack of standardisation, these data come in heterogeneous formats. 2. We review current initiatives...

Grasslands belong to the ecologically most relevant habitats in cultural landscapes, but also provide high economic value when used as meadows or pastures. Land-use intensification in grasslands negatively affects plant diversity as well as arthropod communities that depend on plants as food source and habitat, with important consequences for the p...

Understanding the consequences of species loss in complex ecological communities is one of the great challenges in current biodiversity research. For a long time, this topic has been addressed by traditional biodiversity experiments. Most of these approaches treat species as trait-free, taxonomic units characterizing communities only by species num...

This is the code release complementing the publication of the article 'Animal diversity and ecosystem functioning in dynamic food webs' in Nature Communications. It includes - the simulation code (C) - the analytical code (R) - functions for plotting graphs (R) - code and functions for sensitivity analysis (R) Released under GPL Licence v3.0, Cop...

Supplementary Figures 1-9, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References.

Species diversity is changing globally and locally, but the complexity of ecological communities hampers a general understanding of the consequences of animal species loss on ecosystem functioning. High animal diversity increases complementarity of herbivores but also increases feeding rates within the consumer guild. Depending on the balance of th...

Ecosystems may exhibit catastrophic shifts, i.e. abrupt and irreversible responses of ecosystem functions and services to continuous changes in external conditions. The search for early warning signs of approaching shifts has so far mainly been conducted on theoretical models assuming spatially-homogeneous external pressures (e.g. climatic). Here,...

- original data incl. documentation - original simulation code - original code for statistical analysis Published under permissive MIT (code) and CC4-by (content) licenses.

This repository contains the original source code for a simulation study within the CASCADE project published in Theoretical Ecology, article DOI: 10.1007/s12080-015-0289-1

It is widely accepted that global warming will adversely affect ecological communities. As ecosystems are simultaneously exposed to other anthropogenic influences, it is important to address the effects of climate change in the context of many stressors. Nutrient enrichment might offset some of the energy demands that warming can exert on organisms...

The stability of ecological communities depends strongly on quantitative characteristics of population interactions (type-II vs. type-III functional responses) and the distribution of body masses across species. Until now, these two aspects have almost exclusively been treated separately leaving a substantial gap in our general understanding of foo...

The global decline in biodiversity is especially evident in higher trophic levels as predators display higher sensitivity to environmental change than organisms from lower trophic levels. This is even more alarming given the paucity of knowledge about the role of individual predator species in sustaining ecosystem functioning. The effect of predato...

Climate change has complex structural impacts on coastal ecosystems. Global warming is linked to a widespread decline in body size, whereas increased flood frequency can amplify nutrient enrichment through enhanced run-off. Altered population body-size structure represents a disruption in top-down control, whereas eutrophication embodies a change i...

One important aspect of climate change is the increase in average temperature, which will not only have direct physiological effects on all species but also indirectly modifies abundances, interaction strengths, food-web topologies, community stability and functioning. In this theme issue, we highlight a novel pathway through which warming indirect...

Ecology Letters (2012) 15: 436–443 Understanding effects of species loss in complex food webs with multiple trophic levels is complicated by the idiosyncrasy of the predator effects on lower trophic levels: direct and indirect effects intermingle and may increase, decrease or not affect ecosystem functioning. We introduce a reductionist approach ex...

Applying computational methods for a dynamic concept of species interactions in food webs.