Matteo Dainese

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Verona

Climate change is expected to trigger an upward expansion of plants in mountain regions and, although there is strong evidence that many native species have already shifted their distributions to higher elevations,, little is known regarding how fast non-native species might respond to climate change. By analysing 131,394 occurrence records of 1,33...

Pesticides affect a diverse range of non-target species and may be linked to global biodiversity loss. The magnitude of this hazard remains only partially understood. We present a synthesis of pesticide (insecticide, herbicide and fungicide) impacts on multiple non-target organisms across trophic levels based on 20,212 effect sizes from 1,705 studi...

Mountain ecosystems play an important role globally as centers of biodiversity and in providing ecosystem services to lowland populations, but are influenced by multiple global change drivers such as climate change, nitrogen deposition, or altered disturbance regimes. As global change is accelerating and the consequences for humans and nature are i...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield–related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance...

Background Throughout South Tyrol, in northern Italy, there is a data deficiency relating to wild bee species pool. Here, we present significant findings from the collection of 3,313 wild bees gathered over two separate studies conducted in consecutive years. Our research focused on the impact of landscape heterogeneity, temperature and land-use ch...

Lower atmospheric pressure affects biologically relevant physical parameters such as gas partial pressure and concentration, leading to increased water vapor diffusivity and greater soil water content loss through evapotranspiration. This might impact plant photosynthetic activity, resource allocation, water relations, and growth. However, the dire...

1. Landscape context influences wild bee abundance and diversity, alongside pollination-related services. Growing evidence supports the positive effects of landscape heterogeneity on bee diversity and fruit production for pollination-dependent crops in flatlands. However, little remains known about these relationships in mountainous environments wh...

Ecological intensification has been embraced with great interest by the academic sector but is still rarely taken up by farmers because monitoring the state of different ecological functions is not straightforward. Modelling tools can represent a more accessible alternative of measuring ecological functions, which could help promote their use among...

Aim Theoretical, experimental and observational studies have shown that biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are influenced by functional community structure through two mutually non‐exclusive mechanisms: (1) the dominance effect (which relates to the traits of the dominant species); and (2) the niche partitioning effect [which re...

Although intended to control pests, pesticides affect a phylogenetically diverse range of non-target species contributing to global biodiversity declines 1–7 . However, the magnitude of this risk is only partly understood. Here, we show that pesticides negatively affect non-target organisms across the tree of life. We analyzed 26,096 effect sizes f...

1. Rice-fish co-culture system has a history of more than 2,000 years in Asia and has been recognized as one of FAO's Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). To date, few studies have explored rice-fish co-culture effects on the relationship between predator-prey aggregations and associated tri-trophic cascades of predatory spider...

Intraspecific genetic diversity is an important component of biodiversity. A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated positive effects of plant genetic diversity on plant performance. However, it has remained unclear whether plant genetic diversity generally increases plant performance by reducing the pressure of plant antagonists across troph...

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...

Intraspecific genetic diversity is an important component of biodiversity. A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated positive effects of plant genetic diversity on plant performance. However, it has remained unclear whether plant genetic diversity generally increases plant performance by reducing the pressure of plant antagonists across troph...

Control of crop pests by shifting host plant availability and natural enemy activity at landscape scales has great potential to enhance the sustainability of agriculture. However, mainstreaming natural pest control requires improved understanding of how its benefits can be realized across a variety of agroecological contexts. Empirical studies sugg...

Rice‐fish co‐culture system has a history of more than 2,000 years in Asia and has been recognized as one of FAO's Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). To date, few studies have explored rice‐fish co‐culture effects on the relationship between predator–prey aggregations and associated tri‐trophic cascades of predatory spiders,...

Intraspecific diversity (genetic diversity) is an important component of biodiversity. A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated positive direct or indirect effects of plant genetic diversity on plant performance. However, it has remained unclear whether plant genetic diversity increases plant performance by reducing the pressure of plant-dam...

Seventy five percent of the world's food crops benefit from insect pollination. Hence, there has been increased interest in how global change drivers impact this critical ecosystem service. Because standardized data on crop pollination are rarely available, we are limited in our capacity to understand the variation in pollination benefits to crop y...

The use of ground cover vegetation is becoming a prominent way of promoting biodiversity and associated ecosystem services in Chinese orchards. Despite the large number of studies that have addressed the effects of ground cover vegetation on promoting natural enemy populations and related pest control, it is still unclear whether enhanced natural p...

Natural control of invertebrate crop pests has the potential to complement or replace conventional insecticide-based practices, but its mainstream application is hampered by predictive unreliability across agroecosystems. Inconsistent responses of natural pest control to changes in landscape characteristics have been attributed to ecological comple...

Urbanization is a pressing challenge for earth’s humans because it is changing not only natural environments, but also agricultural lands. Yet, the consequences of cropland loss on pest insect populations that largely depend on these habitats remain largely unclear. We used a 17-year data set to investigate the dynamics of three moth pest species (...

P lant species diversity can influence and provide multiple ecosystem services in terrestrial ecosystems 1-4. In managed ecosystems , plant diversity can be increased by adding more plant species within and around the managed areas or by increasing the structural variation of vegetation in the surrounding landscapes. Such increases in plant species...

The use of ground cover vegetation is becoming a prominent intervention for promoting biodiversity and associated ecosystem services in Chinese orchards. Despite the large number of studies that have examined the effects of ground cover vegetation on promoting natural enemy populations and related natural pest control, it is less understood whether...

Ecosystems integrity and services are threatened by anthropogenic global changes. Mitigating and adapting to these changes requires knowledge of ecosystem functioning in the expected novel environments, informed in large part through experimentation and modelling. This paper describes 13 advanced controlled environment facilities for experimental e...

Several studies have evaluated lichen responses in terms of shifts in species climate suitability, species richness and community composition. In contrast, patterns of co‐occurrence among species that could be related to complex species interactions have received less consideration. Biotic interactions play a major role in shaping species niches, f...

Recent synthesis studies have shown inconsistent responses of crop pests to landscape composition, imposing a fundamental limit to our capacity to design sustainable crop protection strategies to reduce yield losses caused by insect pests. Using a global dataset composed of 5242 observations encompassing 48 agricultural pest species and 26 crop spe...

The adoption of agro-ecological practices in agricultural systems worldwide can contribute to increased food production without compromising future food security, especially under the current biodiversity loss and climate change scenarios. Despite the increase in publications on agro-ecological research and practices during the last 35 years, a wea...

Floral plantings are promoted to foster ecological intensification of agriculture through provision-ing of ecosystem services. However, a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of different floral plantings, their characteristics and consequences for crop yield is lacking. Here we quantified the impacts of flower strips and hedgerows on pest...

Numerous studies have demonstrated that plant species diversity enhances ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems, including diversity effects on insects (herbivores, predators and parasitoids) and plants. However, the effects of increased plant diversity across trophic levels in different ecosystems and biomes have not yet been explored on...

Complexity and context-dependence in ecological and socioecological phenomena often cause inconsistent or seemingly idiosyncratic responses. This apparent lack of generality presents a challenge to the implementation of ecological principles in environmental management. We mostly rely for prediction on data-hungry correlative models that offer litt...

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...

Aim: Alien plant species can cause severe ecological and economic problems, and therefore attract a lot of research interest in biogeography and related fields. To identify potential future invasive species, we need to better understand the mechanisms underlying the abundances of invasive tree species in their new ranges, and whether these mechanis...

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...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield–related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance...

Aim: To date, despite their great potential biogeographical regionalization models have been mostly developed on descriptive and empirical bases. This paper aims at applying the beta-diversity framework on a statistically representative data set to analytically test the consistency of the biogeographical regionalization of Italian forests. Locati...

Managing agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and ecosystem services is a key aim of a sustainable agriculture. However, how the spatial arrangement of crop fields and other habitats in landscapes impacts arthropods and their functions is poorly known. Synthesising data from 49 studies (1515 landscapes) across Europe, we examined effects...

Featured Application Observed shifts in the altitudinal distribution of capercaillie confirms the relevance of habitat restoration actions. Abstract Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus L.), a territorial galliform species, is known to prefer mature conifer stands with canopy gaps and a vigorous understory of ericaceous species. Capercaillie is a useful...

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by few abundant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 crop systems, we partition the relative importance of abundance and s...

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...

Managing agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and ecosystem services is a key aim of a sustainable agriculture. However, how the spatial arrangement of crop fields and other habitats in landscapes impacts arthropods and their functions is poorly known. Synthesising data from 49 studies (1515 landscapes) across Europe, we examined effects...

Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key r...

Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key q...

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...

Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key q...

The abandonment of silvicultural activities can lead to changes in species richness and composition of biological communities, when compared to those found in managed forests. The aim of this study was to compare the multi-taxonomical diversity of two mature silver fir-beech-spruce forests in the southern Dolomites (Italy), corresponding to the Eur...

Natural enemies have been shown to be effective agents for controlling insect pests in crops. However, it remains unclear how different natural enemy guilds contribute to the regulation of pests and how this might be modulated by landscape context. In a field exclusion experiment in oilseed rape (OSR), we found that parasitoids and ground-dwelling...

Spatial patterns of vegetation arise from an interplay of functional traits, environmental characteristics and chance. The retreat of glaciers offers exposed substrates which are colonised by plants forming distinct patchy patterns. The aim of this study was to unravel whether patch-level landscape metrics of plants can be treated as functional tra...

Appendix S1 List of the species.

Appendix S2 CCA ordination diagram.

1. The decline of managed honeybees and the rapid expansion of mass-flowering crops increase the risk of pollination limitation in crops and raise questions about novel management approaches for wild pollinators in agroecosystems. Adding artificial nesting sites, such as trap nests, can be a prominent intervention for promoting cavity-nesting bees...

Field‐margin diversification through conservation and restoration of hedgerows is becoming a prominent intervention for promoting biodiversity and associated ecosystem services in intensive agricultural landscapes. However, how increasing cover of hedgerows in the landscape can affect ecosystem services has rarely been considered. Here, we assessed...

Aim: To assess the spatial-temporal dynamics of primary succession following deglaciation in soil-dwelling lichen communities. Location: European Alps (Austria, Switzerland and Italy). Methods: Five glacier forelands subjected to relevant glacier retreat during the last century were investigated. In each glacier foreland, three successional stages...

Land-use change is one of the primary drivers of species loss, yet little is known about its effect on other components of biodiversity that may be at risk. Here, we ask whether, and to what extent, landscape simplification, measured as the percentage of arable land in the landscape, disrupts the functional and phylogenetic association between prim...

Mass-flowering crops (MFCs) are increasingly cultivated and might influence pollinator communities in MFC fields and nearby semi-natural habitats (SNHs). Across six European regions and 2 years, we assessed how landscape-scale cover of MFCs affected pollinator densities in 408 MFC fields and adjacent SNHs. In MFC fields, densities of bumblebees, so...

We examined the main and interactive effects of factors related to habitat filtering, dispersal dynamics, and biotic interactions, on tree-level population dynamics of a subset of species composing the epiphytic lichen pool in an alpine forest. We tested these processes evaluating the population size of 14 lichen species on six hundred and sixty-fi...

The main aim of this study was to elucidate the roles of terrain age and spatial self-organisation as drivers of primary succession using high-resolution assessment of plant composition, functional traits and landscape metrics. We sampled 46 plots, 1m x 1m each, distributed along a 15-70 year range of terrain ages on the foreland of the Nardis glac...

The main aim of this study was to elucidate the roles of terrain age and spatial self-organisation as drivers of primary succession using high-resolution assessment of plant composition, functional traits and landscape metrics. We sampled 46 plots, 1m x 1m each, distributed along a 15-70 year range of terrain ages on the foreland of the Nardis glac...

The introduction and conservation of field margins have been proposed as an intervention to counteract the decline in farmland biodiversity. However, how these margins can affect the movement of species and individuals (i.e. spillover) of natural enemies between field margins and crop is still unclear. In this work, we investigated the spillover of...

The effectiveness of conservation interventions for maximizing biodiversity benefits from agri-environment schemes (AESs) is expected to depend on the quantity of semi-natural habitats in the surrounding landscape. To verify this hypothesis, we developed a hierarchical sampling design to assess the effects of field boundary type and cover of semi-n...

The species richness of hedges in an agricultural landscape may be determined by the environment and by the spatial processes which occur in that landscape. Here, we divided the environmental predictors into three groups: site conditions, hedge stand and landscape structure. We determined their indepen- dent and joint effects on the richness of fou...

Epiphytic lichens are a functionally important and species-rich component of Alpine forests, including several species of conservation concern. Their dependence on specific host trees predicts that forests with different tree species composition host different lichen communities, enhancing lichen diversity in forest landscapes. In this study, we te...

Background and aims Hedges, semi-natural landscape components, have the ability to integrate both agronomic and environmental functions and to provide several ecosystem services. The aim of this study was to test whether hedgerow vegetation is a determinant of soil organic matter properties in ancient agricultural lands. Methods We complemented clu...

The paper provides the first estimate of the role of abiotic and anthropogenic variables driving both alien plant species richness and composition covering the whole region of the European Alps. To establish and spread in a new area, alien plants must be able to tolerate the prevailing climatic conditions. We therefore tested the hypothesis that cl...

The objective of this study was to investigate a grid-based sampling design to determine the cross-scalar selection of habitat by a territorial animal species: the hazel grouse (Tetrastes bonasia L.). In each of three sites with increasing hazel grouse nest site density, three lattice grids were used to measure both the habitat variables and the sp...

In mountain areas of touristic interest the evaluation of the impact of human activities is crucial for ensuring long-term conservation of ecosystem biodiversity, functions and services. This study aimed at verifying the biological impact of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emissions due to traffic along the roads leading to seven passes of th...

Several studies have demonstrated that seed mass is related to different environmental factors. However, they have taken no account of the joint effects of spatial and phylogenetic information. We analysed the distribution pattern of seed mass along an elevational gradient (1040–2380 m a.s.l.) at the community level in grasslands of the southern Al...