Ingolf Kühn

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research | UFZ · Department of Community Ecology

To address the biodiversity crisis, global and regional policy frameworks like the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Green Deal demand to monitor biodiversity. Despite these efforts, existing approaches for monitoring biodiversity remain fragmented and lack data integration. Here, we review and synthesize crucial infor...

Aim Functional traits help to understand the ecological processes underlying biological invasions. The extent to which trait data are available for alien plants at the global scale is unknown. In this study, we assess the availability of trait data and identify global gaps and biases Location Global Time Period Present Major taxa studied Vascul...

Functional traits mediate how species and communities respond to (or affect) environmental gradients. These are impacted by global change, which has led to e.g. climate change and land-use change, affecting soil conditions, species richness and functional diversity in, among others, xerothermic (respectively dry or semidry) grasslands. Within the l...

Invasive alien species (IAS) threaten biodiversity and human well-being. These threats may increase in the future, necessitating accurate projections of potential locations and the extent of invasions. The main aim of the IAS prototype Digital Twin (IAS pDT) is to dynamically project the level of plant invasion at habitat level across Europe under...

Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well‐being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and man...

Observations are key to understanding the state of nature, the drivers of biodiversity loss and the impacts on ecosystem services and ultimately on people. Many EU policies and initiatives call for unbiased, integrated and regularly updated data on biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, biodiversity monitoring efforts are spatially and tempo...

Gemäß der Verordnung (EU) Nr. 1143/2014 über die Prävention und das Management der Einbringung und Ausbreitung invasiver gebietsfremder Arten erstellt jeder Mitgliedstaat der Europäischen Union (EU) einen Aktionsplan mit Maßnahmen, die die nicht vorsätzliche Einbringung und Ausbreitung invasiver gebietsfremder Arten verhindern sollen. Im vorliegend...

Citizen Science projects aim to make data entry as easy as possible and often provide online data recording or data recording with an App. However, many participants cannot or do not want to use these possibilities and record their data the “old-fashioned” way with pen on paper. We ask whether the quality of data recorded in the “old-fashioned” way...

Rhizosphere microbiome assembly is essential for plant health, but the temporal dimension of this process remains unexplored. We used a chronosequence of 150 years of the retreating Hallstätter glacier (Dachstein, Austria) to disentangle this exemplarily for the rhizosphere of three pioneer alpine plants. Time of deglaciation was an important facto...

The increase in global trade and traffic networks contributes to the introduction and spread of invasive alien species, posing a threat to biodiversity. EU Regulation 1143/2014 addresses the prevention and management of invasive alien species and requires an action plan on the priority pathways of unintentional introduction and spread of invasive a...

Gemäß der Verordnung (EU) Nr. 1143/2014 über die Prävention und das Management der Einbringung und Ausbreitung invasiver gebietsfremder Arten erstellt jeder Mitgliedstaat der Europäische Union (EU) einen Aktionsplan mit Maßnahmen, die die nicht vorsätzliche Einbringung und Ausbreitung invasiver gebietsfremder Arten verhindern sollen. Im vorliegende...

Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, nature's contributions to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...

Land use change, as a result of many local-scale decisions scaling up to large spatial extents, is considered the main threat to European butterflies. The impact of large-scale pressures, such as atmospheric nitrogen deposition or climate change, is less understood or less documented, respectively. However, it is acknowledged that they might reinfo...

Many plant traits covary with environmental gradients, reflecting shifts in adaptive strategies and thus informing about potential consequences of future environmental change for vegetation and ecosystem functioning. Yet, the evidence of trait–environment relationships (TERs) remains too heterogeneous for reliable predictions, partially due to insu...

The Anthropocene is characterized by a rapid pace of environmental change and is causing a multitude of biotic responses, including those that affect the spatial distribution of species. Lagged responses are frequent and species distributions and assemblages are consequently pushed into a disequilibrium state. How the characteristics of environment...

Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well-being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and man...

The biogeographical patterns of ecosystems and species distributions we know today are, apart from other effects such as evolution or ecological interactions, the result of a continuous progression of spatial processes since different species emerged. These spatial processes accelerated tremendously with the advent of modern humans and their effect...

The goal of this task was to identify and characterise novel methods for biodiversity monitoring, and to assess their suitability for large scale deployment across Europe. To address this goal we combined extensive literature searches with expert consultation, namely using a survey and through an online workshop. The outcome of our searches is summ...

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...

1. Invasive alien species are one of the major threats to global biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, natures contribution to people and human health. While scenarios about potential future developments have been available for other global change drivers for quite some time, we largely lack an understanding of how biological invasions might unfold in...

Species introduced through human-related activities beyond their native range, termed alien species, have various impacts worldwide. The IUCN Environmental Impact Classification for Alien Taxa (EICAT) is a global standard to assess negative impacts of alien species on native biodiversity. Alien species can also positively affect biodiversity (for i...

Prairie dogs (Cynomys sp.) are considered keystone species and ecosystem engineers for their grazing and burrowing activities (summarized here as disturbances). As climate changes and its variability increases, the mechanisms underlying organisms' interactions with their habitat will likely shift. Understanding the mediating role of prairie dog dis...

Citizen science (CS) projects, being popular across many fields of science, have recently also become a popular tool to collect biodiversity data. Although the benefits of such projects for science and policy making are well understood, relatively little is known about the benefits participants get from these projects as well as their personal back...

Many plant traits covary with environmental gradients, reflecting shifts in adaptive strategies under changing conditions and thus providing information about potential consequences of future environmental change for vegetation and ecosystem functioning. Despite extensive efforts to map trait-environment relationships, the evidence remains heteroge...

Information on grassland land-use intensity (LUI) is crucial for understanding trends and dynamics in biodiversity , ecosystem functioning, earth system science and environmental monitoring. LUI is a major driver for numerous environmental processes and indicators, such as primary production, nitrogen deposition and resilience to climate extremes....

1. Prairie dogs (Cynomys sp.) are considered keystone species and ecosystem engineers for their grazing and burrowing activities (summarized here as disturbances). As climate changes and its variability increases, the mechanisms underlying organisms’ interactions with their habitat will likely shift. Understanding the mediating role of prairie dog...

Observations are key to understand the drivers of biodiversity loss, and the impacts on ecosystem services and ultimately on people. Many EU policies and initiatives demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor biodiversity are spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomical...

Nonmotile microorganisms often enter new habitats by co-transport with motile microorganisms. Here, we report that also lytic phages can co-transport with hyphal-riding bacteria and facilitate bacterial colonization of a new habitat. This is comparable to the concept of biological invasions in macroecology. In analogy to invasion frameworks in plan...

National and local governments need to step up efforts to effectively implement the post‐2020 global biodiversity framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity to halt and reverse worsening biodiversity trends. Drawing on recent advances in interdisciplinary biodiversity science, we propose a framework for improved implementation by national...

The functioning of present ecosystems reflects deep evolutionary history of locally cooccurring species if their functional traits show high phylogenetic signal (PS). However, we do not understand what drives local PS. We hypothesize that local PS is high in undisturbed and stressful habitats, either due to ongoing local assembly of species that ma...

Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, currently existing global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. Here, we use a novel participatory process to develop a diverse...

Invasive alien species are repeatedly shown to be amongst the top threats to biodiversity globally. Robust indicators for measuring the status and trends of biological invasions are lacking, but essential for monitoring biological invasions and the effectiveness of interventions. Here, we formulate and demonstrate three such indicators that capture...

Non-motile microbes enter new habitats often by co-transport with motile microorganisms. Here, we report on the ability of hyphal-riding bacteria to co-transport lytic phages and utilize them as "weapons" during colonization of new water-unsaturated habitats. This is comparable to the concept of biological invasions in macroecology. In analogy to i...

Rice ecosystems vary greatly in climate, edaphic conditions, landscape heterogeneity, agricultural management and biodiversity. However, ongoing land use intensification and conversion to large-scale monoculture are threatening this diversity. We analyzed how rice-growing regions in Southeast Asia differ in diversity and composition of vascular pla...

Alien species in urban areas have a large effect on overall species diversity. A suitable metric of flora's response to environmental change is functional diversity (FD) that refers to the multivariate space of species' trait compositions, reflecting their ecological niches. We studied how FD changed over 320 years of urbanization in the city of Ha...

Driven by the increasing awareness that innovative approaches to solving the problems at hand in our complex human-environment interactions require closer collaboration among scientific disciplines and communities, inter-and transdisciplinary integration is continuously gaining importance in R&D agendas and Research Infrastructure (RI) development...

Understanding how species’ thermal limits have evolved across the tree of life is central to predicting species’ responses to climate change. Here, using experimentally-derived estimates of thermal tolerance limits for over 2000 terrestrial and aquatic species, we show that most of the variation in thermal tolerance can be attributed to a combinati...

The Pladias (Plant Diversity Analysis and Synthesis) Database of the Czech Flora and Vegetation was developed by the Pladias project team in 2014-2018 and has been continuously updated since then. The flora section of the database contains critically revised information on the Czech vascular flora, including 13.6 million plant occurrence records, w...

The extent and impacts of biological invasions on biodiversity are largely shaped by an array of socio-ecological predictors, which exhibit high variation among countries. Yet a global synthetic perspective of how these factors vary across countries is currently lacking. Here, we investigate how a set of five socio-ecological predictors (Governance...

Scenario analysis has emerged as a key tool to analyze complex and uncertain future socio-ecological developments. However, current global scenarios (narratives of how the world may develop) have neglected biological invasions, a major threat to biodiversity and the economy. We used a novel participatory process to develop a diverse set of global b...

Despite conservation commitments, most countries still lack large-scale biodiversity monitoring programs to track progress toward agreed targets. Monitoring program design is frequently approached from a top-down, data-centric perspective that ignores the socio-cultural context of data collection. A rich landscape of people and organizations, with...

Macroecology is the study of patterns, and the processes that determine those patterns, in the distribution and abundance of organisms at large scales, whether they be spatial (from hundreds of kilometres to global), temporal (from decades to centuries), and organismal (numbers of species or higher taxa). In the context of invasion ecology, macroec...

Biological invasions are a major threat to global biodiversity with particularly strong implications for island biodiversity. Much research has been dedicated towards understanding historic and current changes in alien species distribution and impacts on islands and potential changes under future climate change. However, projections of how alien sp...

Methodological research on species distribution modelling (SDM) has so far largely focused on the choice of appropriate modelling algorithms and variable selection approaches, but the consequences of choosing amongst different sources of environmental data has scarcely been investigated. Bioclimatic variables are commonly used as predictors in SDMs...

Biodiversity data are being collected at unprecedented rates. Such data often have significant value for purposes beyond the initial reason for which they were collected, particularly when they are combined and collated with other data sources. In the field of invasion ecology, however, integrating data represents a major challenge due to the notor...

Understanding the likely future impacts of biological invasions is crucial yet highly challenging given the multiple relevant environmental, socio‐economic and societal contexts and drivers. In the absence of quantitative models, methods based on expert knowledge are the best option for assessing future invasion trajectories. Here, we present an ex...

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...

The success of alien plant species can be attributed to differences in functional traits compared to less successful aliens as well as to native species, and thus their adaptation to environmental conditions. Studies have shown that alien (especially invasive) plant species differ from native species in traits such as specific leaf area (SLA), heig...

Biological invasions are a global consequence of an increasingly connected world and the rise in human population size. The numbers of invasive alien species – the subset of alien species that spread widely in areas where they are not native, affecting the environment or human livelihoods – are increasing. Synergies with other global changes are ex...

Urbanization is one of the most intensive and rapid human-driven factors that threat biodiversity. Finding an indicator of species community responses to urbanization is crucial for predicting the consequences of anthropogenic land cover changes. Here, we develop a framework that relies on functional originality. A species is original or equivalent...

Aims Floral traits are frequently studied in population biology and evolutionary ecology but are rarely considered in functional trait‐based studies focusing on the assembly of communities. We address this gap in trait‐based community assembly by synthesizing the existing literature on processes driving floral and pollination‐related trait patterns...

Invasive alien species (IAS) have negative as well as positive effects on human well-being. They can alter ecosystem properties, functions and associated ecosystem services (ES). However, many IAS have negative effects (resulting from reducing ES or by increasing or creating ecosystem disservices (EDS), the latter termed genuine negative effects) o...

Background and aims: Since its emergence in the mid-20th century, invasion biol- ogy has matured into a productive research field addressing questions of fundamen- tal and applied importance. Not only has the number of empirical studies increased through time, but also has the number of competing, overlapping and, in some cases, contradictory hypot...

Ensuring ecosystem resilience is an intuitive approach to safeguard the functioning of ecosystems and hence the future provisioning of ecosystem services (ES). However, resilience is a multi‐faceted concept that is difficult to operationalize. Focusing on resilience mechanisms, such as diversity, network architectures or adaptive capacity, has rece...