Karen Castillioni

University of Minnesota | UMN · Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour

As global climate change impacts ecosystems, establishing conservation priorities is crucial for managing threatened areas with limited resources. Biodiversity hotspots, typically defined by high degrees of endemism, play a key role in conservation. However, traditional hotspots may not capture the full extent of biodiversity, including functional...

Context Metacommunity theory predicts that diversity arising at larger spatial scales (spatial β-diversity) may increase ecosystem functioning if there are positive spatial selection effects whereby species dominate in mixtures at places where they are most productive in monocultures. However, beta-diversity effects on ecosystem functioning remain...

Shifts in flowering phenology are important indicators of climate change. However, the role of precipitation in driving phenology is far less understood compared with other environmental cues, such as temperature. We use a precipitation reduction gradient to test the direction and magnitude of effects on reproductive phenology and reproduction acro...

Climate and human management, such as hay harvest, shape grasslands. With both disturbances co-occurring, understanding how these ecosystems respond to these combined drivers may aid in projecting future changes in grasslands. We used an experimental precipitation gradient combined with mimicked acute hay harvest (clipping once a year) to examine (...

Aim: Ongoing alterations to Earth's biogeochemical cycles (e.g., via fertilization, burning of fossil fuels, and pollution) are expected to impact plants, plant consumers and all subsequent trophic levels. While fertilization experiments often reveal arthropod nutrient limitation by nitrogen and phosphorus via effects on plant nutrient density and...

• Shifts in dominance and species reordering can occur in response to global change. However, it is not clear how altered precipitation and disturbance regimes interact to affect species composition and dominance. • We explored community‐level diversity and compositional similarity responses, both across and within years, to a manipulated precipita...

Arthropod abundance and diversity often track plant biomass and diversity at the local scale. However, under altered precipitation regimes and anthropogenic disturbances, plant–arthropod relationships are expected to be increasingly controlled by abiotic, rather than biotic, factors. We used an experimental precipitation gradient combined with huma...