Katja Rembold

Botanical Garden of the University of Bern

Terrestrial animal biodiversity is increasingly being lost because of land-use change1,2. However, functional and energetic consequences aboveground and belowground and across trophic levels in megadiverse tropical ecosystems remain largely unknown. To fill this gap, we assessed changes in energy fluxes across ‘green’ aboveground (canopy arthropods...

Herbarium specimens provide an irreplaceable source of historical plant distribution data, enabling analysis of changes in plant distribution spanning centuries. Most studies on plant distribution shifts focus on recent decades and rare species, especially along elevational gradients. We examined about 2000 historical herbarium specimens from the B...

Urbanisation is one of the major drivers of global species extinction. Botanical gardens, being diverse green oases in urban landscapes, have a high potential as refuge areas for wild species. How many and which organisms use the gardens as secondary habitats has been little studied. Twenty botanical gardens in Germany, Austria and Switzerland part...

The continuous decline and degradation of tropical rainforests is currently mainly driven by land-use change. Over the long term, climate change will further exacerbate the situation for the remaining forests. To develop sustainable conservation strategies, we need to understand the natural forest-recovery potential after disturbance and the impact...

Deforestation and land-use change in tropical regions result in habitat loss and extinction of species that are unable to adapt. The effects of tropical land-use change on ground spiders, a major group of invertebrate predators, are poorly known. With two methods, we showed >50% decline in spider density, species richness, functional diversity, and...

Land-use transitions can enhance the livelihoods of smallholder farmers but potential economic-ecological trade-offs remain poorly understood. Here, we present an interdisciplinary study of the environmental, social and economic consequences of land-use transitions in a tropical smallholder landscape on Sumatra, Indonesia. We find widespread biodiv...

Deforestation and land‐use change in tropical regions result in habitat loss and extinction of species that are unable to adapt to the conditions in agricultural landscapes. If the associated loss of functional diversity is not compensated by species colonizing the converted habitats, extinctions might be followed by a reduction or loss of ecosyste...

Oil palm plantations are intensively managed agricultural systems that increasingly dominate certain tropical regions. Oil palm monocultures have been criticized because of their reduced biodiversity compared to the forests they historically replaced, and because of their negative impact on soils, water, and climate. We experimentally test whether...

The rapid conversion of Southeast Asian lowland rainforests into monocultures calls for the development of rapid methods for species identification to support ecological research and sustainable land‐use management. Here, we investigated the utilization of DNA barcodes for identifying flowering plants from Sumatra, Indonesia. A total of 1,207 matK...

Conversion of rainforest into agricultural land affects multiple facets of tropical plant diversity. While the effects of tropical land use change and intensification on species diversity are comparatively well studied, the effects on phylogenetic diversity (PD) and structure of plant communities are largely unknown. Furthermore, it is not clear ho...

In context of the vegetation surveys carried out by EFForTS subproject B06, we photographed quite a lot of dragonflies and damselflies inside and near the core plots in Jambi Province (Fig. 1) and in Bogor. The core plots in Jambi cover four land‐use systems: lowland rainforest, jungle rubber agroforest, rubber plantations, and oil palm plantations...

In context of the vegetation surveys carried out by EFForTS subproject B06, we documented common vascular plant species inside and near the core plots in Jambi Province (Fig. 1, for details see Rembold et al. 2017). The core plots cover four land‐use systems: lowland rainforest, jungle rubber agroforest, rubber plantations, and oil palm plantations...

Tropical rainforest has continually been threatened by land-use change due to which a lot of species have been already extinct and some are in danger of extinction. This has also caused serious threat to the livelihood of large numbers of indigenous people as their dependence on forest is high to fulfil their daily needs. This study analyzes how us...

The conversion of tropical rainforest to agricultural systems such as oil palm alters biodiversity across a large range of inter- acting taxa and trophic levels. Yet, it remains unclear how direct and cascading effects of land-use change simultaneously drive ecological shifts. Combining data from a multi-taxon research initiative in Sumatra, Indone...

1. The high biodiversity and biomass of soil communities is crucial for litter decomposition in terrestrial ecosystems such as tropical forests. However, the leaf litter that these communities consume is of particularly poor quality as indicated by elemental stoichiometry. The impact of resource quantity, quality, and other habitat parameters on sp...

Table S1. Observed number of species and individuals per consumer group. Table S2. Sample cover and correlation between observed and extrapolated richness. Table S3. Correlation table for the predictors from the statistical analysis. Table S4. Model averaging results for consumer species richness. Table S5. Model averaging results for consumer biom...

Smallholder-dominated agricultural mosaic landscapes are highlighted as model production systems that deliver both economic and ecological goods in tropical agricultural landscapes, but trade-offs underlying current land-use dynamics are poorly known. Here, using the most comprehensive quan-tification of land-use change and associated bundles of ec...

Primer pair sequences for plants, bacteria, and archaea

Supplementary Figures 1 - 9, Supplementary Tables 1 - 5, Supplementary Note 1 and Supplementary References

Land-use change is the main driver of biodiversity loss in the tropics worldwide. Lowland rainforest regions in Southeast Asia are experiencing particularly high rates of large-scale conversion of forests and agroforests into monocultural tree plantations including oil palm and rubber with devastating effects on forest-dependent species. Canopy-dwe...

Sound recordings obtained from passive acoustic monitoring systems are increasingly used to sample animal biodiversity. However, sound recorders sample variable detection spaces, so that data may not be comparable between sampling sites and recording setups. Focusing on terrestrial systems, we measured understory vegetation, tree structure, sound...

Tropical lowland rainforests are increasingly threatened by the expansion of agriculture and the extraction of natural resources. In Jambi Province, Indonesia, the interdisciplinary EFForTS project focuses on the ecological and socio-economic dimensions of rainforest conversion to jungle rubber agroforests and monoculture plantations of rubber and...

Disturbances caused by the conversion of rain forests into agricultural systems provide an opportunity for the expansion of Invasive Plant Species (IPS). Bukit Duabelas National Park is one of the few remaining lowland forests in Jambi Province (Sumatera, Indonesia). The surrounding areas up to the national park borders have already been converted...

Carnivorous pitcher plants capture insect prey to acquire essential nutrients while growing on extremely poor soils. A few individual species have evolved mutualistic relationships with small mammals that visit the traps to harvest nectar, and in return leave faecal droppings in the pitchers. Here we report that a diverse guild of nectar-harvesting...

A new species of Nepenthes L., N. appendiculata, from Sarawak, is described and illustrated. This new taxon is known only from the Hose Mountains and can easily be distinguished from all other Bornean members of the genus by its pitcher morphology, and particularly the unique glandular appendage present on the underside of the lids of its upper pit...

An annotated checklist of the Kakamega Forest in Kakamega District is presented. The checklist includes the plants found mainly in Buyangu National Reserve, and the Nature Reserves of Isecheno and Yala. It also includes the adjacent forest fragments of Malava, Kisere and Kaimosi. Nine hundred and eighty six (986) plant taxa (including 36 introduced...

The temporarily carnivorous plant species Triphyophyllum peltatum is currently being cultivated at the Botanical Gardens of the Universities of Bonn and Würzburg. In both gardens, it developed carnivorous glandular leaves. This paper complements earlier communications concerning propagation and greenhouse cultivation of this rare West African plant...

Nepenthes madagascariensis is a carnivorous plant which captures its prey in pitcher-like leaves. It is endemic to Madagascar where it occurs along the eastern coast. Altogether 94.3% of its prey animals belong to three taxa: Formicidae (80.2%), Diptera (9.7%) and Coleoptera (4.4%). The prey compositions of the dimorphic lower and upper pitcher typ...

Nepenthes pitcher plants are typically carnivorous, producing pitchers with varying combinations of epicuticular wax crystals, viscoelastic fluids and slippery peristomes to trap arthropod prey, especially ants. However, ant densities are low in tropical montane habitats, thereby limiting the potential benefits of the carnivorous syndrome. Nepenthe...