Johannes H C Cornelissen

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · A-LIFE, Systems Ecology

Global warming increases the risk of wildfire and insect outbreaks, potentially reducing the carbon storage function of coarse woody debris (CWD). There is an increasing focus on the interactive effects of wildfire and insect infestation on forest carbon, but the impact of wood‐boring beetle tunnels via their effect on the flammability of deadwood...

Lichens play important roles in habitat formation and community succession in polar and alpine ecosystems. Despite their significance, the ecological effects of lichen traits remain poorly researched. We propose a trait trade‐off for managing light exposure based on climatic harshness. In the harshest cold environments, where abiotic stress predomi...

The biogeochemical niche (BN) hypothesis is based on the concentrations of the predominant elements of a given organism to be stoichiometrically matched in order for it to function adequately. However, it is unknown how BN is represented by different plant organs and to what extent environment or evolution affects BN. We measured C, N, P, K, Ca and...

Many eucalypt trees shed their bark annually. This bark becomes a component of the litter layer, which acts as fuel, especially during surface fires. The amount and quality of shed bark vary greatly among species, which might have important effects on forest surface fire behavior. In this study, we aimed to compare the bark fuel bed flammability of...

Complementary resource use by functionally different species may accelerate ecosystem processes. However, how co‐variation in plant traits and animal traits promotes complementarity through temporal plant–animal interactions is poorly understood, even less so in detrital systems, thereby hampering our fundamental understanding of decomposition and...

Invertebrates and microorganisms are important but climate-dependent agents of wood decomposition globally. In this meta-analysis, we investigated what drives the invertebrate effect on wood decomposition worldwide. Globally, we found wood decomposition rates were on average approximately 40% higher when invertebrates were present compared to when...

Resorption of key elements promotes their conservation in plants in nutrient‐poor ecosystems. In seasonal environments, the timing of resorption is expected to influence resorption efficiency and plant fitness due to the trade‐off between maximizing photosynthetic carbon gain by late resorption and minimizing frost risks and nutrient loss by early...

Deadwood represents a significant carbon pool and unique biodiversity reservoir in forests and savannas but has been largely overlooked until recently. Storage and release of carbon from deadwood is controlled by interacting decomposition drivers including biotic consumers (animals and microbes) and abiotic factors (water, fire, sunlight, and freez...

Termites—one of the most abundant animal groups in tropical ecosystems—are vital in nutrient recycling, contributing significantly to maintaining ecosystem functioning. However, how selective they are in their litter food choice, and whether they prefer nutritious or less nutritious litter substrates, are still important unresolved questions. Here,...

The differences in mass loss of leaf litter are primarily thought to be driven by microbial activity, especially by fungi. However, the existence of such differences across large spatial scales has not been well explored in field studies and the underlying mechanisms of difference are still unclear, especially for the role of different fungal guild...

Arctic and alpine tundra ecosystems are large reservoirs of organic carbon1,2. Climate warming may stimulate ecosystem respiration and release carbon into the atmosphere3,4. The magnitude and persistency of this stimulation and the environmental mechanisms that drive its variation remain uncertain5–7. This hampers the accuracy of global land carbon...

Climate change and other anthropogenic disturbances are increasing liana abundance and biomass in many tropical and subtropical forests. While the effects of living lianas on species diversity, ecosystem carbon, and nutrient dynamics are receiving increasing attention, the role of dead lianas in forest ecosystems has been little studied and is poor...

Dead trees are vital structural elements in forests playing key roles in the carbon and nutrient cycle. Stem traits and fungal community composition are both important drivers of stem decay, and thereby affect ecosystem functioning, but their relative importance for stem decomposition over time remains unclear. To address this issue, we used a comm...

Variation in leaf traits is critical for carbon gains and losses during leaf life and drives litter carbon and nutrient losses via decomposition. Accurately quantifying litter decomposition parameters is essential for assessing ecosystem carbon and nutrient dynamics. Leaf litterbags have commonly been employed to measure effects of environmental dr...

Evidence is mounting that vertebrate defaunation greatly impacts global biogeochemical cycling. Yet, there is no comprehensive assessment of the potential vertebrate influence over plant decomposition, despite litter decay being one of the largest global carbon fluxes. We therefore conducted a global meta-analysis to evaluate vertebrate effects on...

The relationship between phylogenetic diversity (PD) and functional diversity (FD) is important for understanding the mechanisms of community assembly. The traditional view assumes a coupled (positively correlated) relationship between these two diversity measures, suggesting that competitive exclusion and environmental filtering are important driv...

Downed woody debris (DWD) plays an important role as regulator of nutrient and carbon (C) cycling in forests, accounting for up to the 20 % of the total C stocks in primary forests. DWD persistence is highly influenced by microbial decomposition, which is determined by various environmental factors, including fluctuations in temperature and moistur...

During rainfall, plant litter interception regulates overland flow with an impact on water runoff generation and sediment displacement. Besides the rainfall characteristics, the effects of litter mass, thickness, storage and drainage properties on rainfall interception are reasonably well understood. In contrast, less is known about the influence o...

Climate change is leading to species redistributions. In the tundra biome, shrubs are generally expanding, but not all tundra shrub species will benefit from warming. Winner and loser species, and the characteristics that may determine success or failure, have not yet been fully identified. Here, we investigate whether past abundance changes, curre...

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average, and plant communities are responding through shifts in species abundance, composition and distribution. However, the direction and magnitude of local plant diversity changes have not been explored thus far at a pan-Arctic scale. Using a compilation of 42,234 records of 490 vascular pl...

Australia’s distinctive biogeography means that it is sometimes considered an ecologically unique continent with biological and abiotic features that are not comparable to those observed in the rest of the world. This leaves some researchers unclear as to whether findings from Australia apply to systems elsewhere (or vice-versa), which has conseque...

As Earth's climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate shapes spatial variation in biodiversity. Here, we assessed the influence of Quaternary climate change on spatial dissimila...

In the last three decades, quantitative approaches that rely on organism traits instead of taxonomy have advanced different fields of ecological research through establishing the mechanistic links between environmental drivers, functional traits, and ecosystem functions. A research subfield where trait-based approaches have been frequently used but...

Microbial necromass is an important source and component of soil organic matter (SOM), especially within the most stable pools. Global change factors such as anthropogenic nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) inputs, climate warming, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (eCO2 ), and periodic precipitation reduction (drought) strongly affe...

Plant functional traits are increasingly recognised as being impacted by soil abiotic and biotic factors. Yet, the question to what extent the coupling between community‐level above‐ and below‐ground traits is affected by soil conditions remains open. In a field experiment in dune grassland, we quantified the responses of both community‐level leaf...

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...

Aim The plant economics spectrum provides a fundamental framework for understanding functional trait variation along environmental gradients. However, it is unclear whether there is a general whole-plant economics spectrum across organs at the finer taxonomic scale (e.g. within genera), and if there is, which factors affect the trait coordination o...

Climate change is leading to a species redistributions. In the tundra biome, many shrub species are expanding into new areas, a process known as shrubification. However, not all tundra shrub species will benefit from warming. Winner and loser species (those projected to expand and contract their ranges, and/or those that have increased or decreased...

Plant functional traits are increasingly used to understand ecological relationships and (changing) ecosystem functions. For understanding ecosystem‐level biogeochemistry, we need to understand how (much) traits co‐vary between different plant organs across species and its implications for litter decomposition. However, we do not know how the degre...

Biological decomposition and wildfire are two predominant and alternative processes that can mineralize organic C in forest litter. Currently, the relationships between decomposition and fire are still poorly understood. We provide an empirical test of the hypothesized decoupling of surface litter bed decomposability and flammability, and the under...

Litters of leaves and roots of different qualities occur naturally above‐ and below‐ground, respectively, where they decompose in contrasting abiotic and biotic environments. Therefore, ecosystem carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) dynamics can be strongly affected by the combination of litter position and quality. However, it is poorly understood how C ve...

Decomposition rates of litter mixtures reflect the combined effects of litter species diversity, litter quality, decomposers, their interactions with each other and with the environment. The outcomes of those interactions remain ambiguous and past studies have reported conflicting results (e.g., litter mixture richness effects). To date, how litter...

Previous studies showed that bark cover at early‐decay stage had profound control on the invertebrate assemblages of bark and wood, with possible consequence for the decomposition process. However, previous experimental designs could not disentangle how bark versus wood traits affect the invertebrate assemblage process in bark and/or wood separatel...

The metamicrobiome is an integrated concept to study carbon and nutrient recycling in ecosystems. Decomposition of plant-derived matter by free-living microbes and fire – two key recycling pathways – are highly sensitive to global change. Mutualistic associations of microbes with plants and animals strongly reduce this sensitivity. By solving a fun...

Deadwood is a large global carbon store with its store size partially determined by biotic decay. Microbial wood decay rates are known to respond to changing temperature and precipitation. Termites are also important decomposers in the tropics but are less well studied. An understanding of their climate sensitivities is needed to estimate climate c...

Carbon and nutrient recycling by free-living microbial decomposers and fire - two key recycling pathways - are highly sensitive to climatic variation. However, mutualistic associations of microbiomes with plants and animals cause previously underestimated environmental buffering effects. This close cooperation between small and large organisms solv...

Coevolution has driven speciation and evolutionary novelty in functional traits across the Tree of Life. Classic coevolutionary syndromes such as plant–pollinator, plant–herbivore, and host–parasite have focused strongly on the fitness consequences during the lifetime of the interacting partners. Less is known about the consequences of coevolved tr...

Lianas account for a small fraction of forest biomass, but their contribution to leaf or litter biomass and thus to food webs can be substantial. Globally liana exhibit fast life‐history traits. Thus, liana litter may decompose faster than tree litter, and could enhance the decomposition of tree litter (complementarity effect). The differences in d...

The soil nitrogen (N) cycle in cold terrestrial ecosystems is slow and organically bound N is an important source of N for plants in these ecosystems. Many plant species can take up free amino acids from these infertile soils, either directly or indirectly via their mycorrhizal fungi. We hypothesized that plant community changes and local plant com...

A priority research field addresses how to optimize diverse ecosystem services to people, including biodiversity support, regulatory, utilitarian and cultural services. This field may benefit from linking ecosystem services to the sizes of different body parts of organisms, with functional traits as the go-between. Using woody ecosystems to explore...

Revealing the ecological consequences of bark multifunctionality and its underlying traits has become a relatively new but essential focus in plant ecology. Although the enormous differences between the most crucial bark layers, that is, inner and outer bark, in structure and functions have been widely recognized, the overall bark has been regarded...

Safeguarding Earth’s tree diversity is a conservation priority due to the importance of trees for biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services such as carbon sequestration. Here, we improve the foundation for effective conservation of global tree diversity by analyzing a recently developed database of tree species covering 46,752 species. We q...

Foliar nitrogen (N) or phosphorus (P) status and their stoichiometric homeostasis are integral parts of the plant nutrient economy that determines the success of plant species in environments where N or P limits plant growth. Despite growing evidence for higher predictability of stoichiometric homeostasis of N (HN) than that of P (HP) on plant spec...

Although plant–plant interactions (i.e. competition and facilitation) have long been recognised as key drivers of plant community composition and dynamics, their global patterns and relationships with climate have remained unclear. Here, we assembled a global database of 10,502 pairs of empirical data from the literature to address the patterns of...

Simulations of the land surface carbon cycle typically compress functional diversity into a small set of plant functional types (PFT), with parameters defined by the average value of measurements of functional traits. In most earth system models, all wild plant life is represented by between five and 14 PFTs and a typical grid cell (≈100 × 100 km)...

Understanding nitrogen (N) cycling in different ecosystems is crucial to predicting and mitigating the global effects of altered N inputs. Although wetlands have always been assumed to differ largely from terrestrial ecosystems in N cycling, evidence from direct comparison from the field along wide environmental gradients is lacking. Here, we hypot...

A central paradigm in comparative ecology is that species sort out along a slow-fast resource economy spectrum of plant strategies, but this has been rarely tested for a comprehensive set of stem traits and compartments. We tested how stem traits vary across wood and bark of temperate tree species, whether a slow-fast strategy spectrum exists, and...

Dead wood quantity and quality is important for forest biodiversity, by determining wood inhabiting fungal assemblages. We therefore evaluated how fungal communities were regulated by stem traits and compartments (i.e., bark, outer‐ and inner wood) of 14 common temperate tree species. Fresh logs were incubated in a common garden experiment in a for...

Snow is an important driver of ecosystem processes in cold biomes. Snow accumulation determines ground temperature, light conditions and moisture availability during winter. It also affects the growing season’s start and end, and plant access to moisture and nutrients. Here, we review the current knowledge of the snow cover’s role for vegetation, p...

Snow is an important driver of ecosystem processes in cold biomes. Snow accumulation determines ground temperature, light conditions, and moisture availability during winter. It also affects the growing season’s start and end, and plant access to moisture and nutrients. Here, we review the current knowledge of the snow cover’s role for vegetation,...