Mariska te Beest

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Utrecht University

Wild animals can modulate ecosystem-climate feedbacks, e.g. through impacts on vegetation and associated carbon dynamics. However, vegetation cover and composition also affect land surface albedo, which is an important component of the global energy budget. We currently know very little about the influence of wild animals on land surface albedo and...

Empirical studies worldwide show that warming has variable effects on plant litter decomposition, leaving the overall impact of climate change on decomposition uncertain. We conducted a meta‐analysis of 109 experimental warming studies across seven continents, using natural and standardised plant material, to assess the overarching effect of warmin...

Tropical forest and savanna frequently coexist under the same climatic conditions, which has led to the hypothesis that they could represent alternative ecosystem states, stabilized by internal feedbacks. An implication of this hypothesis is that forest and savanna may be bistable and exhibit tipping behavior in response to changing conditions. How...

Forbs are important contributors to species diversity and ecosystem functions in low-latitude grasslands, where they support diverse herbivore communities and millions of people. Native forb assemblages tolerate disturbances and physiological stressors (fire, herbivory, drought, and frost) that together have shaped their exceptional functional dive...

Forbs are important contributors to species diversity and ecosystem functions in low-latitude grasslands, where they support diverse herbivore communities and millions of people. Native forb assemblages tolerate disturbances and physiological stressors (fire, herbivory, drought, and frost) that together have shaped their exceptional functional dive...

Nature-based solutions for mitigating climate change focus largely on land management to reduce carbon emissions and enhance carbon sequestration. Tree planting, commonly advocated for carbon offset, threatens grassland biodiversity and may induce positive radiative forcing (warming) by lowering albedo. Before making decisions about land-use change...

High-density short-duration grazing (SDG) is widely suggested to increase productivity. Among various SDG practices, the most widespread and popular, "holistic grazing," claims to mimic the movement patterns of wild African ungulate herds to improve rangeland health and promote biodiversity. However, this claim has rarely been empirically tested. F...

Empirical studies worldwide show substantial variability in plant litter decomposition responses to warming, leaving the overall impact of climate change on this process uncertain. We conducted a meta-analysis of 109 experimental warming studies across seven continents, utilizing natural and standardized plant material, to assess the overarching ef...

Plant species occupy distinct niches along a nitrogen‐to‐phosphorus (N:P) gradient, yet there is no general framework for belowground nutrient acquisition traits in relation to N or P limitation. We retrieved several belowground traits from databases, placed them in the “root economics space” framework, and linked these to a dataset of 991 plots in...

Parthenium hysterophorus L. (Parthenium), an annual to biennial herbaceous plant, is well established in parts of the Kruger National Park (KNP). Over the past two decades Parthenium has become widespread in the southern region of KNP, demonstrating an ability to spread rapidly. While large programmes and substantial financial resources have been d...

Across Africa, vast areas of nonforest are threatened by inappropriate restoration in the form of tree planting

Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species’ population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate ‘intactness scores’: the remaining proportion of...

Rangelands face threats from climate and land-use change, including inappropriate climate change mitigation initiatives such as tree planting in grassy ecosystems. The marginalization and impoverishment of rangeland communities and their indigenous knowledge systems, and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, are additional major challeng...

Savannas cover one‐fifth of the Earth's surface, harbour substantial biodiversity, and provide a broad range of ecosystem services to hundreds of millions of people. The community composition of trees in tropical moist forests varies with climate, but whether the same processes structure communities in disturbance‐driven savannas remains relatively...

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...

Recent studies suggest that wild animals can promote ecosystem carbon sinks through their impacts on vegetation and soils. However, livestock studies show that intense levels of grazing reduce soil organic carbon (SOC), leading to concerns that rewilding with large grazers may compromise ecosystem carbon storage. Furthermore, wild grazers can both...

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...

Despite the importance of high-latitude surface energy budgets (SEBs) for land-climate interactions in the rapidly changing Arctic, uncertainties in their prediction persist. Here, we harmonize SEB observations across a network of vegetated and glaciated sites at circumpolar scale (1994–2021). Our variance-partitioning analysis identifies vegetatio...

Spatial variation in plant chemical defence towards herbivores can help us understand variation in herbivore top–down control of shrubs in the Arctic and possibly also shrub responses to global warming. Less defended, non‐resinous shrubs could be more influenced by herbivores than more defended, resinous shrubs. However, sparse field measurements l...

Ecological niche differences are necessary for stable species coexistence but are often dif- ficult to discern. Models of dietary niche differentiation in large mammalian herbivores invoke the quality, quantity, and spatiotemporal distribution of plant tissues and growth forms but are agnostic toward food plant species identity. Empirical support f...

Fire has been an integral evolutionary force shaping and maintaining grassy biomes, such as the Afromontane grasslands of South Africa. Afromontane grasslands represent a large carbon reservoir, but it is uncertain how fire affects their long-term C storage. We investigated the effect of fire regime on soil organic C and N (SOC; SON) in a long-term...

von Humboldt’s tree-line concept has dominated mountain ecology for almost two hundred years, and is considered a key indicator for monitoring change in biome boundaries and biodiversity shifts under climate change. Even though the concept of life zones and elevation gradients are a globally observed phenomenon, they have not been thoroughly explor...

von Humboldt’s tree-line concept has dominated mountain ecology for almost two hundred years, and is considered a key indicator for monitoring change in biome boundaries and biodiversity shifts under climate change. Even though the concept of life zones and elevation gradients are a globally observed phenomenon, they have not been thoroughly explor...

Megaherbivores (adult body mass > 1000 kg) are suggested to disproportionately shape ecosystem and Earth system functioning. We systematically reviewed the empirical basis for this general thesis and for the more specific hypotheses that 1) megaherbivores have disproportionately larger effects on Earth system functioning than their smaller counterp...

Positive biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships (BEFRs) have been widely documented, but it is unclear if BEFRs should be expected in disturbance‐driven systems. Disturbance may limit competition and niche differentiation, which are frequently posited to underlie BEFRs. We provide the first exploration of the relationship between tree specie...

Fire and herbivory are important natural disturbances in grassy biomes. Both drivers are likely to influence belowground microbial communities but no studies have unravelled the long-term impact of both fire and herbivory on bacterial and fungal communities. We hypothesized that soil bacterial communities change through disturbance-induced shifts i...

Plant functional traits provide a valuable tool to improve our understanding of ecological processes at a range of scales. Previous handbooks on plant functional traits have highlighted the importance of standardising measurements of traits to improve our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes. In open ecosystems (i.e. grasslands, s...

Climate change is one of the main challenges facing humanity in the coming century. To understand the impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, we urgently require a better understanding of plant responses to climate change. To address this knowledge gap we established a full-factorial warming experiment using open-top cha...

The idea that tropical forest and savanna are alternative states is crucial to how we manage these biomes and predict their future under global change. Large-scale empirical evidence for alternative stable states is limited, however, and comes mostly from the multimodal distribution of structural aspects of vegetation. These approaches have been cr...

Significance We develop a biogeographic approach to analyzing the presence of alternative stable states in tropical biomes. Whilst forest–savanna bistability has been widely hypothesized and modeled, empirical evidence has remained scarce and controversial, and here, applying our method to Africa, we provide large-scale evidence that there are alte...

Paradoxically, despite the growth in protected areas globally, many species remain threatened and continue to decline. Attempts to conserve species in suboptimal habitats (i.e., as refugee species) may in part explain this Protected Area Paradox. Refugee species yield poor conservation outcomes as they suffer lower densities and fitness. We suggest...

The majority of variation in six traits critical to the growth, survival and reproduction of plant species is thought to be organised along just two dimensions, corresponding to strategies of plant size and resource acquisition. However, it is unknown whether global plant trait relationships extend to climatic extremes, and if these interspecific r...

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...

Climate change is a worldwide threat to biodiversity and ecosystem structure, functioning, and services. To understand the underlying drivers and mechanisms, and to predict the consequences for nature and people, we urgently need better understanding of the direction and magnitude of climate‐change impacts across the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum...

Landscapes of fear have become widely studied in the northern hemisphere, but are still largely understudied in the more complex, diverse carnivore-prey communities of Africa. Habitat changes brought about by a mega-herbivore, the African elephant (Loxodonta africana), can modify the perceived landscape of fear by predation vulnerable prey species...

Aim Plant functional groups are widely used in community ecology and earth system modelling to describe trait variation within and across plant communities. However, this approach rests on the assumption that functional groups explain a large proportion of trait variation among species. We test whether four commonly used plant functional groups rep...

Aim In tropical Africa, savannas cover huge areas, have high plant species richness and are considered as a major natural resource for most countries. There is, however, little information available on their floristics and biogeography at the continental scale, despite the importance of such information for our understanding of the drivers of speci...

Aim In tropical Africa, savannas cover huge areas, have high plant species richness and are considered as a major natural resource for most countries. There is, however, little information available on their floristics and biogeography at the continental scale, despite the importance of such information for our understanding of the drivers of speci...

Motivation: The Tundra Trait Team (TTT) database includes field‐based measurements of key traits related to plant form and function at multiple sites across the tundra biome. This dataset can be used to address theoretical questions about plant strategy and trade‐offs, trait–environment relationships and environmental filtering, and trait variation...

The loss of megafauna at the terminal Pleistocene has been linked to a wide range of Earth-system-level changes, such as altered greenhouse gas budgets, fire regimes and biome-level vegetation changes. Given these influences and feedbacks, might part of the solution for mitigating anthropogenic climate change lie in the restoration of extant megafa...

The tundra is warming more rapidly than any other biome on Earth, and the potential ramifications are far-reaching because of global feedback effects between vegetation and climate. A better understanding of how environmental factors shape plant structure and function is crucial for predicting the consequences of environmental change for ecosystem...

The above mentioned article was originally scheduled for publication in the special issue on Ecology of Tundra Arthropods with guest editors Toke T. Høye . Lauren E. Culler. Erroneously, the article was published in Polar Biology, Volume 40, Issue 11, November, 2017. The publisher sincerely apologizes to the guest editors and the authors for the in...

Herbivores impact nutrient availability and cycling, and the net effect of herbivory on soil nutrients is generally assumed to be positive in nutrient-rich environments and negative in nutrient-poor ones. This is, however, far from a uniform pattern, and there is a recognized need to investigate any interactive effects of herbivory and habitat fert...

Chronic, low intensity herbivory by invertebrates, termed background herbivory, has been understudied in tundra, yet its impacts are likely to increase in a warmer Arctic. The magnitude of these changes is however hard to predict as we know little about the drivers of current levels of invertebrate herbivory in tundra. We assessed the intensity of...

Aim Habitat loss and fragmentation is one of the main drivers of defaunation, that is the loss of large mammals. Biological invasions could be drivers of such phenomenon. However, their impact on large herbivore communities has not been studied to our knowledge. We made use of a landscape-scale control programme of one of the world's worst invaders...

Centring on South Africa's Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, this book synthesizes a century of insights from the ecology and conservation management of one of Africa's oldest protected wildlife areas. The park provides important lessons for conservation management, as it has maintained conservation values rivalling those of much larger parks sometimes throu...

Biological invasions have increased dramatically in the past centuries and are one of the greatest threats to biodiversity today. Chromolaena odorata, a herbaceous shrub from the Americas, is one of the most widespread and problematic invasive plant species in the tropics and sub-tropics. The plant is a serious problem in South Africa, where invasi...

Centring on South Africa's Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, this book synthesizes a century of insights from the ecology and conservation management of one of Africa's oldest protected wildlife areas. The park provides important lessons for conservation management, as it has maintained conservation values rivalling those of much larger parks sometimes throu...

Centring on South Africa's Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, this book synthesizes a century of insights from the ecology and conservation management of one of Africa's oldest protected wildlife areas. The park provides important lessons for conservation management, as it has maintained conservation values rivalling those of much larger parks sometimes throu...

Previous studies have shown that climate warming is causing shrub cover to increase at high latitudes. Increased shrub cover generally lowers surface albedo, which results in higher energy absorption and further warming. In parts of Fennoscandia herbivory is known to control vegetation height and density, thus preventing this positive feedback. Her...

As researchers try to predict the effects of human modification at all trophic levels and mediate the impact of rapid environmental change, it has become clear it is no longer a matter of agreeing that both bottom-up and top-down forces play important roles in diverse ecosystems. Rather, the question is: how do these forces interact across aquatic...

Our understanding of the link between plant functional traits and ecological impact of invasive alien plant species is fragmentary and the mechanisms leading to impacts are poorly understood. Moreover, current knowledge is heavily biased to the temperate regions of the world and we know much less about traits and impacts of invaders in tropical and...

QuestionResistance of the native community has been identified as an important factor limiting invasion success and invader impact. However, to what extent resistance interacts with disturbance to control invasion success remains unclear. We studied the interaction between biotic resistance, fire and small-scale disturbances mimicking those of larg...

Aim A major challenge for invasion ecology is to identify high‐impact invaders to guide prioritization of management interventions. We argue that species with the potential to cause regime shifts (altered states of ecosystem structure and function that are difficult or impossible to reverse) should be prioritized. These are species that modify ecos...

1.Megaherbivores have been lost from most ecosystems worldwide and current increases in poaching of rhino and elephant spp. threaten their status in the systems where they still occur. Although megaherbivores are said to be key drivers of ecosystem structure and functioning, empirical evidence is strongly biased to studies on African elephant. We u...

Predicting impacts of global warming requires understanding of the extent to which plant biomass and production are controlled by bottom-up and top-down drivers. By annually monitoring community composition in grazed control plots and herbivore-free exclosures at an Arctic location for 15 years, we detected multiple biotic interactions. Regular rod...

Climatic niche models based on native-range climatic data accurately predict invasive-range distributions in the majority of species. However, these models often do not account for ecological and evolutionary processes, which limit the ability to predict future range expansion. This might be particularly problematic in the case of invaders that occ...

Successfully managing invasive plants in natural systems is extremely difficult. Recently however, progress has been made with an approach focused on changing ecosystem processes through the disturbance regime. We performed a large-scale (3 ha) full-factorial field experiment in densely invaded woodland in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, a savanna reserve...

Biological invasions are a major ecological and socio-economic problem in many parts of the world. Despite an explosion of research in recent decades, much remains to be understood about why some species become invasive whereas others do not. Recently, polyploidy (whole genome duplication) has been proposed as an important determinant of invasivene...

1. Soil communities and their interactions with plants may play a major role in determining the success of invasive species. However, rigorous investigations of this idea using cross‐continental comparisons, including native and invasive plant populations, are still scarce. 2. We investigated if interactions with the soil community affect the growt...

Twenty two morphological characters of twenty three taxa of the genera Physalis, Margaranthus and Withania were analysed with the help of phenetic methods in an attempt to increase the understanding of the relationships within the genus Physalis. A clear distinction is shown between the Old World species, P. alkekengi and P. glabripes, and the New...

During the last century biological invasions have become an important global phenomenon and constitute one of the most serious threats to biodiversity worldwide. Invasions are characterized by the proliferation, spread and persistence of species in new areas that are often very distant from their native ranges. They largely result from the ever-exp...