Lars Götzenberger

• PhD
• Researcher at The Czech Academy of Sciences

Understanding how communities of living organisms assemble has been a central question in ecology since the early days of the discipline. Disentangling the different processes involved in community assembly is not only interesting in itself but also crucial for an understanding of how communities will behave under future environmental scenarios. Th...

Questions Mechanisms of community assembly are increasingly explored by combining community and species trait data with null models. By investigating if the traits of co‐existing species are more similar (trait convergence) or more dissimilar (trait divergence) than expected by chance, these tests relate observed patterns to different co‐existence...

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...

The stability of ecological communities is critical for the stable provisioning of ecosystem services, such as food and forage production, carbon sequestration, and soil fertility. Greater biodiversity is expected to enhance stability across years by decreasing synchrony among species, but the drivers of stability in nature remain poorly resolved....

Major dimensions of plant ecological strategies have been widely studied bringing forward the concept of ‘economic spectra’ of plants. Sexual reproductive traits, ‘floral traits’, have been largely neglected in this context, despite their strong link to fitness. Here, we aimed at integrating floral traits into the dimensionality of plant form and f...

Understanding how land use affects temporal stability is crucial to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Yet, the mechanistic links between land-use intensity and stability-driving mechanisms remain unclear, with functional traits likely playing a key role. Using 13 years of data from 300 sites in Germany, we tested whether and how trait-...

Theories explaining community assembly assume that biotic and abiotic filters sort species into communities based on the values of their traits and are thus based on between‐species trait variability (BTV). Nevertheless, these filters act on individuals rather than on species. Consequently, the selection is also influenced by intraspecific trait va...

Aim The influence of species phylogenetic relatedness on the formation of insular assemblages remains understudied in functional island biogeography, especially for terrestrial habitat islands (i.e. distinct habitat patches embedded in a matrix that differ in the prevailing environmental conditions). Here, we tested three eco‐evolutionary hypothese...

Aim Identifying the drivers of ecological stability is critical for ensuring the maintenance of ecosystem functioning and services, particularly in a changing world. Different ecological mechanisms by which biological communities stabilize ecosystem functions (i.e. “stabilizing effects”) have been proposed, yet with various theoretical expectations...

An accumulating body of evidence indicates that natural plant populations harbour a large diversity of transposable elements (TEs). TEs, which are especially mobilized under genomic and/or environmental stress, provide genetic and epigenetic variation that can substantially translate into a diversity of plant phenotypes within populations. However,...

Ecological differences between coexisting species within plant communities can be assessed by considering functional and phylogenetic dissimilarities either separately or in a complementary way. Here, we studied (a) the potential overlap between functional (FD) and phylogenetic diversities (PD) and (b) their combined and unique roles in explaining...

Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species' ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, especially across different biomes. We compiled a worldwide collection of long-term permanent vegetati...

While biodiversity is expected to enhance multiple ecosystem functions (EFs), the different roles of multiple biodiversity dimensions remain difficult to disentangle without carefully designed experiments. We sowed plant communities with independent levels of functional (FD) and phylogenetic diversities (PD), combined with different levels of ferti...

Community-level studies linking plant mycorrhizal status to environment usually do not account for within-plot mycorrhizal status variability; thus, patterns of plant mycorrhizal status diversity are largely unknown. Here, we assessed the relative importance of within- and between-plot variability components in mycorrhizal status and examined how p...

Invasions of alien plants pose a serious threat to native biodiversity and ecosystem processes. Forests are considered more resistant to invasion due to limited light availability in understories. However, disturbance and abiotic stress may open tree canopies and promote invasion. Their combined effects together with the resistance of resident spec...

Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species’ ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, specially across different ecosystems. To address this, we compiled a global collection of long-term p...

Understanding the mechanisms underlying community stability has become an urgent need to protect ecosystems from global change and resulting biodiversity loss. While community stability can be influenced by species richness, synchrony in annual fluctuations of species, species stability and functional traits, the relative contributions of these dri...

Analysing temporal patterns in plant communities is extremely important to quantify the extent and the consequences of ecological changes, especially considering the current biodiversity crisis. Long‐term data collected through the regular sampling of permanent plots represent the most accurate resource to study ecological succession, analyse the s...

Purpose Plant species diversity is expected to affect multiple ecosystem functions, such as soil nitrogen (N) availability. However, this effect may be related to the ecological differentiation between coexisting species, often expressed as either functional diversity (FD; diversity in traits) or phylogenetic diversity (PD; diversity in phylogeneti...

Aim Ecological communities are assembled by regional and local processes. These processes select species through their traits, which are tied to species' evolutionary history. A multifaceted approach, encompassing taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity can thus help us to better understand community assembly. We asked what the relative im...

Aim: Trait-based approaches are being used increasingly in island biogeography, providing key insights into the eco-evolutionary dynamics of insular systems. However, the determinants of persistence of plant species after they have arrived and established on an island remain largely unexplored. Here, we used three edaphic island systems (i.e., habi...

Although plant clonality is an important reproductive strategy complementing seed reproduction, their interrelationship is seldom studied. We evaluated how plant clonality, together with plant economics spectrum and architectural constraints, affect the generative reproduction characteristics of co-existing grassland species. For this purpose, we c...

An accumulating body of evidence indicates that natural plant populations harbour a large diversity of transposable elements (TEs). TEs provide genetic and epigenetic variation that can substantially translate into changes in plant phenotypes. Despite the wealth of data on the ecological and evolutionary effects of TEs on plant individuals, we have...

Analysing temporal patterns in plant communities is extremely important to quantify the extent and the consequences of ecological changes, especially considering the current biodiversity crisis. Long-term data collected through the regular sampling of permanent plots represent the most accurate resource to study ecological succession, analyse the s...

Under global change, how biological diversity and ecosystem services are maintained in time is a fundamental question. Ecologists have long argued about multiple mechanisms by which local biodiversity might control the temporal stability of ecosystem properties. Accumulating theories and empirical evidence suggest that, together with different popu...

Questions Evaluating seed production as a community function in species-rich temperate grasslands, we asked: (1) Do ancient and restored grasslands differ in the composition of seed-producing species? (2) Do seed-producing species of ancient and restored grasslands differ in their functional traits and habitat origin of their species? (3) How does...

Aim Trait-based approaches are increasingly implemented in island biogeography, providing key insights into the eco-evolutionary dynamics of insular systems. However, what determines persistence of plant species once they have arrived and established in an island remains largely unexplored. Here, we examined links between non-acquisitive persistenc...

Increased drought is predicted to have a major impact on plant performance under environmental change. Yet leaf hydraulic traits directly related to drought tolerance, such as leaf turgor loss point (πtlp), are under‐represented in trait‐based studies and have been largely overlooked within the main frameworks evaluating trait–trait coordination an...

Handbook of Trait-Based Ecology - From Theory to R Tools Functional ecology is the branch of ecology that focuses on various functions that species play in the community or ecosystem in which they occur. This accessible guide offers the main concepts and tools in trait-based ecology, and their tricks, covering different trophic levels and organism...

Questions Theory suggest that while plant diversity of grasslands decreases in response to increased competition for light, many plant species persist belowground even in the temporary absence of shoots. Thus, we hypothesized that belowground diversity is less affected by increased competition during land‐use change compared to aboveground. Locati...

Questions Compensatory dynamics are described as one of the main mechanisms that increase community stability, e.g. where decreases of some species on a year‐to‐year basis are offset by an increase in others. Deviations from perfect synchrony between species (asynchrony) have therefore been advocated as an important mechanism underlying biodiversit...

The stability of ecological communities is critical for the stable provisioning of ecosystem services, such as food and forage production, carbon sequestration, and soil fertility. Greater biodiversity is expected to enhance stability across years by decreasing synchrony among species, but the drivers of stability in nature remain poorly resolved....

Question Habitat‐specific species pools are shaped by ecological and evolutionary processes such as speciation, extinction, and migration. However, their role is poorly known because of the lack of robust data on species pools across a large number of plant community types and large areas. Here, we analyse a unique dataset of species pools of diagn...

The deficiency of pollen grains for ovule fertilization can be the main factor limiting plant reproduction and fitness. Because of the ongoing global changes, such as biodiversity loss and landscape fragmentation, a better knowledge of the prevalence and predictability of pollen limitation is challenging within current ecological research. In our s...

Functional redundancy is considered a major component of the insurance mechanism, which theoretically maintains ecosystem stability by preventing the loss of ecosystem functions with species loss. Over the past decades, examination of functional trait patterns to elucidate processes of community stability and ecosystem functioning have stimulated c...

The study of insular systems has a long history in ecology and biogeography. Island plants often differ remarkably from their noninsular counterparts, constituting excellent models for exploring eco-evolutionary processes. Trait-based approaches can help to answer important questions in island biogeography, yet plant trait patterns on islands remai...

Functional and phylogenetic diversity (FD and PD respectively) of the resident community are expected to exert a key role in community resistance to colonization by surrounding species, and their establishment success. However, few studies have explored this topic experimentally or evaluated the interactive effects of these diversity measures. We i...

What determines the stability of communities under environmental fluctuations remains one of the most debated questions in ecology. Scholars generally agree that the similarity in year‐to‐year fluctuations between species is an important determinant of this stability. Concordant fluctuations in species abundances through time (synchrony) decrease s...

Studies addressing multiple aspects of biodiversity simultaneously (i.e., multifaceted approaches) can quantify plant diversity-environment links comprehensively - this is because of the multidimensional nature of plant diversity. However, multifaceted studies are scant in forests. Here, we examined taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Questions Species pools are the product of complex ecological and evolutionary mechanisms, operating over a range of spatial scales. Here, we focus on species absent from local sites but with the potential to establish within communities — known as dark diversity. Methods for estimating dark diversity are still being developed and need to be compar...

Traditionally, trait‐based studies have explored single‐trait‐fitness relationships. However, this approximation in the study of fitness components is often too simplistic, given that fitness is determined by the interplay of multiple traits, which could even lead to multiple functional strategies with comparable fitness (i.e. alternative designs)....

Although many studies have shown that species richness decreases from low to high latitudes (the Latitudinal Diversity Gradient), little is known about the relationship between latitude and phylogenetic diversity. Here we examine global latitudinal patterns of phylogenetic diversity using a dataset of 459 woody and 589 herbaceous plant communities....

Questions The majority of theories of trait‐based plant community assembly have been developed and tested predominantly in terrestrial ecosystems. Studies investigating the functional trait composition of aquatic plant communities and their relation to environmental determinants remain scarce. Macrophytes are essential components of aquatic ecosyst...

Habitat filtering and limiting similarity are well‐documented ecological assembly processes that hierarchically filter species across spatial scales, from a regional pool to local assemblages. However, information on the effects of fine‐scale spatial partitioning of species, working as an additional mechanism of coexistence, on community patterns i...

Plant invasions can drastically change the structure of native communities, but it is not fully understood whether alien species occupy phylogenetic and functional space within the range occupied by natives, or provide a novel set of evolutionary origins and traits to the invaded communities. Here, we evaluated this open question with data on a lar...

Mountain plant diversity results from a myriad of factors, including evolutionary history, species pools, abiotic and biotic constraints. For instance, increasing stress (e.g., elevation) often selects communities with species originating from fewer, and more closely-related clades. We assessed phylogenetic diversity and turnover of plant communiti...

To address the lack of information about the shape and extent of real dispersal kernels, Bullock et al. ( Journal of Ecology 105:6‐19, 2017) synthesised empirical information on seed dispersal distances. Testing the fit of a variety of probability density functions, they found no function was the best‐fitting for all datasets but some outperformed...

Functional traits and phylogeny offer different, and often complementary, information about ecological differences between species, an essential step to uncover biodiversity assembly mechanisms and their feedbacks to ecosystem functions. However, traits and phylogeny are often related due to underlying trait evolution. Consequently, when combined,...

Plant functional traits are now frequently used instead of species identity to identify how plant species co-exist in assemblages. One notion is that species inhabiting the same environment have more characteristics in common than species from different habitats, leading to different prevailing dominant traits along environmental gradients, and als...

Human-driven environmental changes can induce marked shifts in the functional structure of biological communities with possible repercussion on important ecosystem functions and services. At the same time it remains unclear to which extent these changes may differently affect various types of organisms. We investigated species richness and communit...

ContextLandscape fragmentation significantly affects species distributions by decreasing the number and connectivity of suitable patches. While researchers have hypothesized that species functional traits could help in predicting species distribution in a landscape, predictions should depend on the type of patches available and on the ability of sp...

Linking diversity to biological processes is central for developing informed and effective conservation decisions. Unfortunately, observable patterns provide only a proportion of the information necessary for fully understanding the mechanisms and processes acting upon a particular population or community. Here, we suggest conservation managers uti...

1) Dispersal is fundamental to ecological processes at all scales and levels of organization, but progress is limited by a lack of information about the general shape and form of plant dispersal kernels. We addressed this gap by synthesizing empirical data describing seed dispersal and fitting general dispersal kernels representing major plant type...

We analysed the spatial distribution patterns of plant species’ arbuscular mycorrhizal status across an intermediate geographical scale (i.e. the country of Germany) and related this distributions to environmental drivers. Three levels of arbuscular mycorrhizal status of plant species could be defined: (1) obligate arbuscular mycorrhizal species th...

It is trite to say “publish or perish,” yet many early career researchers are often at a loss on how to best get their work published. With strong competition and many manuscripts submitted, it is difficult to convince editors and reviewers to opt for acceptance. A pragmatic approach to publishing may increase one's odds of success. Here, we – a gr...

Questions Wet meadows have traditionally been managed at low intensity, promoting the co‐existence of a variety of plant species. The remaining fragments of these meadows are now being degraded by either mowing abandonment or by agricultural intensification, such as increased fertilization. We tested the theoretical expectation that certain functio...

The functional structures of communities respond to environmental changes by both species replacement (turnover) and within-species variation (intraspecific trait variability; ITV). Evidence is lacking on the relative importance of these two components, particularly in response to both short- and long-term environmental disturbance. We hypothesized...

Functional diversity (FD) is an important component of biodiversity that quantifies the difference in functional traits between organisms. However, FD studies are often limited by the availability of trait data and FD indices are sensitive to data gaps. The distribution of species abundance and trait data, and its transformation, may further affect...

Study sites and sampling methods. Detailed description of the sampling and trait collection in the three communities. (DOCX)

Data used for the analysis. Abundance and trait data for our plant, ant, and bird communities. (ZIP)

Results of the linear mixed effect models. Tables A1 –A5 presenting results of all linear mixed effects models. (DOCX)

Positive and negative plant-plant interactions generally co-occur in communities but their relative importance should depend on site productivity; the importance of facilitation is expected to increase and that of competition to decrease with the adversity of the environment. Moreover the effect of surrounding vegetation on an individual’s performa...

There is considerable uncertainty about if, and when, phylogenetic information is needed to answer various ecological questions about trait-based ecological studies. It has been recommended that both functional and phylogenetic information should be combined, and some researchers have even suggested that functional information for species should be...

Aim A trait‐based biogeographical approach can be used to shed light on species‐sorting mechanisms that are driven by the interactions between species traits and abiotic conditions along large‐scale gradients. We tested the hypothesis that geographical patterns of woody plant assemblages are driven largely by environmental filtering, in relation to...

Semi-natural meadows host a great number of species coexisting at fine spatial scales. Different assembly mechanisms, related to differences in functional traits between species, can influence such coexistence. Coexisting species could be either functionally dissimilar to occupy different niches (‘divergence’) or functionally similar due to exclusi...

Many studies have shown plant species' dispersal distances to be strongly related to life-history traits, but how well different traits can predict dispersal distances is not yet known. We used cross-validation techniques and a global data set (576 plant species) to measure the predictive power of simple plant traits to estimate species' maximum di...

Plant traits have been widely used to characterize different aspects of the ecology of plant species. Despite its wide distribution and its proven significance at the level of individuals, communities, and populations, the ability to form mycorrhizal associations has been largely neglected in these studies so far. Analyzing plant traits associated...

Functional trait differences among species are increasingly used to infer the effects of biotic and abiotic processes on species coexistence. Commonly, the trait diversity observed within communities is compared to patterns simulated in randomly generated communities based on sampling within a region. The resulting patterns of trait convergence and...

1. While plant competition for light has received considerable attention, the facilitative effect that shading can have on plants and the role of species‐specific adaptations in mediating this phenomenon are still poorly understood. Evidence is accumulating, however, that positive interactions can play as important a role in community structuring a...

Here we test whether genome size is a predictor of pollen size. If it were, inferences of ancient genome size would be possible using the abundant paleo-palynolgical record. We performed regression analyses across 464 species of pollen width and genome size. We found a significant positive trend. However, regression analysis using phylogentically i...

1. An international group of scientists has built an open internet data base of life-history traits of the Northwest European flora (the LEDA-Traitbase) that can be used as a data source for fundamental research on plant biodiversity and coexistence, macro-ecological patterns and plant functional responses. 2. The species-trait matrix comprises re...

With environmental factors being spatially structured, plant traits that are related to these factors should exhibit a corresponding spatial pattern. We analyzed the distribution pattern of seed mass in Germany. We calculated the median seed mass for 10′ longitude by 6′ latitude grid cells across Germany using the trait databases BIOLFLOR and the p...

In this study two important factors that are thought to govern interspecific variation in pollen-ovule ratios were examined. First, the effect of habitat disturbance on variation in pollen-ovule ratio was determined. The second factor studied was the pollination type, used as a surrogate for the efficiency of pollination. Because seed mass is known...

The Pollen ovule ratio is an important flower-biological and mating-ecological parameter that shows an enormous interspecific variability, ranging from a few to millions of pollen grains per ovule. The present thesis is the first work that attempts to explain the interspecific variation in pollen ovule ratios by analysing large numbers of species w...

Hypothesis: Sex allocation theory predicts that the pollen-ovule ratio should decrease linearly with increasing pollen size among seed plants (Charnov, 1982).Data examined: We retrieved data for pollen-ovule ratio, pollen size, pollen grain number, and mating system from published literature for 311 angiosperm plant species.Methods: We used model I...

Species of Mediterranean vegetation are known to regenerate directly after fire. The phenomenon of autosuccession (direct regeneration) has been found to be often combined with an increase of species richness during the first years after fire due to the high abundance of short-lived herbaceous plants facilitated by plentiful nutrients and light. Th...

ABSTRACT Hypothesis:Sex allocation theory predicts that the pollen–ovule ratio should increase linearly with increasing seed size among seed plants (Charnov, 1982). Data examined: We retrieved data for the pollen–ovule ratio, seed size, and possible confounding variables (ovule number, plant height, mating system) from a database and additional lit...

Postfire regeneration of thermomediterranean shrublands burnt in 1998 was studied in the Province of Murcia (SE Spain). The vegetation struc- ture of sites with different exposures was compared with that of adja- cent unburnt areas. Three years after the fire, the mean vegetation cover of the burnt sites was still significantly lower than that of t...

Se estudia la regeneración postincendio de un matorral termomedite- rráneo, incendiado en 1998, en la provincia de Murcia (SE de Espa- ña). Se compara la estructura de la vegetación de lugares con diferen- tes exposiciones frente a la de áreas próximas no quemadas. Tres años después del fuego, la cobertura de la vegetación en los lugares incen- dia...