Johannes H C Cornelissen

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

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 consequ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

1. 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 separa...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ( H N ) than that of P ( H P ) on plan...

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)...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

Biodiversity loss, exotic plant invasion and climatic change are three important global changes that can affect litter decomposition. These effects may be interactive and these global changes thus need to be considered simultaneously. Here, we assembled herbaceous plant communities with five species richness levels (1, 2, 4, 8 or 16) and subjected...

Aim The interactions between plants and soil microbes play crucial roles in modulating the function and stability of terrestrial ecosystems. However, the relationships between plant and soil microbial diversity for different taxa have remained been elusive. Location Northern China. Major taxa Plant and soil microbes of grassland ecosystems. Time...

Climate extremes may occur throughout the year with large consequences for ecosystem functioning and feedbacks. Early snowmelt and drought often precede arctic fires, which in turn may degrade permafrost and thereby influence ecosystem functioning for many years post-fire. Overwintering “zombie fires” in the Arctic, which smolder from one fire seas...

Animals, such as termites, have largely been overlooked as global-scale drivers of biogeochemical cycles 1,2 , despite site-specific findings 3,4 . Deadwood turnover, an important component of the carbon cycle, is driven by multiple decay agents. Studies have focused on temperate systems 5,6 , where microbes dominate decay ⁷ . Microbial decay is se...

Plant functional traits can predict community assembly and ecosystem functioning and are thus widely used in global models of vegetation dynamics and land–climate feedbacks. Still, we lack a global understanding of how land and climate affect plant traits. A previous global analysis of six traits observed two main axes of variation: (1) size variat...

More than half of the net primary production in terrestrial ecosystems returns to the soil through leaf litter fall and decomposition. In terrestrial ecosystems, litter constitutes a mixture of mainly senescent foliage from multiple species. Yet, the effect of litter mixing on litter decomposition rate remains ambiguous. Quantification of the soil...

Soil seed banks represent a critical but hidden stock for potential future plant diversity on Earth. Here we compiled and analyzed a global dataset consisting of 15,698 records of species diversity and density for soil seed banks in natural plant communities worldwide to quantify their environmental determinants and global patterns. Random forest m...

Dead wood is a source of life as it provides habitat and substrate for a wide range of fungal species. A growing number of studies show an important role of wood quality for fungal diversity, but in most cases for a limited number of wood traits or tree species. In this study, we evaluate how abiotic and biotic factors affect the fungal diversity a...

In the context of a recent massive increase of research on plant root functions and their impact on the environment, root ecologists currently face many important challenges to keep on generating cutting edge, meaningful and integrated knowledge. Consideration of the belowground components in plant and ecosystem studies has been consistently called...

Among the most important ecosystem processes in wetlands is plant litter decomposition, which provides the detrital food chains with matter and energy and consequently could affect ecosystem health and integrity. Varying degrees of anthropogenic eutrophication mostly due to urbanization, are prevalent problems in many wetlands and aquatic ecosystem...

Environmental changes, for example, in rainfall and land use, lead to changes in the environment experienced by subsequent generations of plant species. Environmental conditions of maternal plants can influence the fitness and phenotypes of subsequent generations via non‐genetic mechanisms: transgenerational plasticity (TGP). However, relevant empi...

The relative contribution of bryophytes to plant diversity, primary productivity, and ecosystem functioning increases towards colder climates. Bryophytes respond to environmental changes at the species level, but because bryophyte species are relatively difficult to identify, they are often lumped into one functional group. Consequently, bryophyte...

Rainfall interception by vegetation plays an important role in the hydrological cycle. Next to rainfall characteristics, interception is influenced by tree size, crown structure and bark morphology. How tree traits determine interception across functionally and morphologically wide-ranging tree species is poorly understood. We determined intercepti...

The plant economics spectrum integrates trade‐offs and covariation in resource economic traits of different plant organs and their consequences for pivotal ecosystem processes, such as decomposition. However, in this concept stems are often considered as one unit ignoring the important functional differences between wood (xylem) and bark. These dif...

Natural forests contain a large amount of deadwood, which is a key contributor to biodiversity, especially by providing dynamic habitats and resources for a huge variety of invertebrates. However, for managing forest biodiversity we need to better understand what drives the dynamics of invertebrate communities in deadwood. We hypothesized that the...

Reassembling ecological communities and rebuilding habitats through active restoration treatments require curating the selection of plant species to use in seeding and planting mixes. Ideally, these mixes should be assembled based on attributes that support ecosystem function and services, promote plant and animal species interactions and ecologica...

Biodiversity loss, exotic plant invasions and climatic change are currently the three major challenges to our globe and can each affect various ecological processes, including litter composition. To gain a better understanding of global change impacts on ecological processes, these three global change components need to be considered simultaneously...

Reassembling ecological communities and rebuilding habitats through active restoration treatments requires curating the selection of plant species to use in seeding and planting mixes. Ideally, these mixes should be assembled based on attributes that support ecosystem function and services, promote plant and animal species interactions and ecologic...

Life history strategies are fundamental to the ecology and evolution of organisms and are important for understanding extinction risk and responses to global change. Using global datasets and a multiple response modelling framework we show that trait‐climate interactions are associated with life history strategies for a diverse range of plant speci...

Significance Identifying species assemblages that boost the provision of multiple ecosystem functions simultaneously (multifunctionality) is crucial to undertake effective restoration actions aiming at simultaneously promoting biodiversity and high multifunctionality in a changing world. By disentangling the effect of multiple traits on multifuncti...

Changes in the composition of plant functional traits may affect ecosystem processes through influencing trophic interactions. Bottom‐up control by plant species through food availability to animals may vary with time. However, such dynamics and their consequences for deadwood turnover are poorly known for detrital food webs. We introduce a dynamic...

Background Wind strongly impacts plant growth, leaf traits, biomass allocation, and stem mechanical properties. However, whether there are common whole-plant wind responses among different plant species is still unclear. We tested this null hypothesis by exposing four eudicot steppe species to three different wind treatments in a field experiment:...

Motivation Trait data are fundamental to the quantitative description of plant form and function. Although root traits capture key dimensions related to plant responses to changing environmental conditions and effects on ecosystem processes, they have rarely been included in large‐scale comparative studies and global models. For instance, root trai...

This paper introduces a modular processing chain to derive global high-resolution maps of leaf traits. In particular, we present global maps at 500 m resolution of specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content, leaf nitrogen and phosphorus content per dry mass, and leaf nitrogen/phosphorus ratio. The processing chain exploits machine learning techniq...

Purpose of Review Defining the mechanisms behind and the leaf economic consequences of the development of sclerophylly in woody plants will allow us to understand its ecological implications, anticipate the potential for adaptation of different tree species to global change, and define new woody plant ideotypes for stress tolerance. Recent Finding...

Snow roots are a very special type of roots that counteract geotropism to grow upward into long‐lasting snow fields. They develop under snow at near 0ºC, a phenomenon that had previously only been reported from plant shoots (Körner et al. 2019). Up to now, this intriguing and spectacular looking plant structure has been discovered and studied in on...

Both historical and contemporary environmental conditions determine present biodiversity patterns, but their relative importance is not well understood. One way to disentangle their relative effects is to assess how different dimensions of beta-diversity relate to past climatic changes, i.e., taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional compositional dis...

Abstract Biomass allocation patterns reflect the adaptive strategies of plants growing in different environments, which is a central issue in comparative plant ecology and evolution. However, the factors underpinning specific allocation patterns across organs and the existence of general rules governing allocation remain contentious. Optimal partit...

Plant traits reflect growth strategies and trade-offs in response to environmental conditions. Because of climate warming, plant traits might change, altering ecosystem functions and vegetation–climate interactions. Despite important feedbacks of plant trait changes in tundra ecosystems with regional climate, with a key role for shrubs, information...

Aims Multi-stemming supports plants’ resilience to disturbances and then contributes to soil stabilization and forest function, especially in mountain habitats. Many questions remain about (1) the ontogenetic phase at which multiple stems can occur; (2) how habitat drivers affect multi-stemming and (3) whether ontogenetic phase and habitat drivers...

Many insects use plant-borne vibrations to obtain important information about their environment, such as where to find a mate or a prey, or when to avoid a predator. Plant species can differ in the way they vibrate, possibly affecting the reliability of information, and ultimately the decisions that are made by animals based on this information. We...

Patterns of plant trait variation across spatial scales are important for understanding ecosystem functioning and services. However, habitat-related drivers of these patterns are poorly understood. In a conceptual model, we ask whether and how the patterns of within- and among-site plant trait variation are driven by habitat type (terrestrial vs. w...