Nico Eisenhauer

German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig | iDiv · Experimental Interaction Ecology

It remains unclear whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against climate extremes, which are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide. Early results suggested that the ecosystem productivity of diverse grassland plant communities was more resistant, changing less during drought, and more resilient, recovering more quickly after drought, than that...

Soil organisms, including earthworms, are a key component of terrestrial ecosystems. However, little is known about their diversity, their distribution, and the threats affecting them. We compiled a global dataset of sampled earthworm communities from 6928 sites in 57 countries as a basis for predicting patterns in earthworm diversity, abundance, a...

A monitoring and indicator system can inform policy

Human activities cause substantial changes in biodiversity. Despite ongoing concern about the implications of invertebrate decline, few empirical studies have examined the ecosystem consequences of invertebrate biomass loss. Here, we test the responses of six ecosystem services informed by 30 above- and belowground ecosystem variables to three leve...

Extreme weather events are occurring more frequently, and research has shown that plant diversity can help mitigate the impacts of climate change by increasing plant productivity and ecosystem stability. Although soil temperature and its stability are key determinants of essential ecosystem processes, no study has yet investigated whether plant div...

Forest restoration by planting tree seedlings is a crucial strategy to mitigate climate change and restore forest functions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) targets to remove around 70 Pg carbon (C) from the atmosphere via forest restoration. However, the impact of forest restoration on the recovery of soil organic carbon (SOC)...

Increasing extreme climatic events threaten the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems1,2. Because soil microbes govern key biogeochemical processes, understanding their response to climate extremes is crucial in predicting the consequences for ecosystem functioning3,4. Here we subjected soils from 30 grasslands across Europe to four contrasting ext...

In Europe, various conservation programs adopted to maintain or restore biodiversity have experienced differing levels of success. However, a synthesis about major factors for success of biodiversity-related conservation programs across ecosystems and national boundaries, such as incentives, subsidies, enforcement, participation, or spatial context...

Biodiversity experiments revealed that plant diversity loss can decrease ecosystem functions across trophic levels. To address why such biodiversity-function relationships strengthen over time, we established experimental mesocosms replicating a gradient in plant species richness across treatments of shared versus non-shared history of (1) the plan...

Climate change and land‐use intensification are threatening soil communities and ecosystem functions. Understanding the combined effects of climate change and land use is crucial for predicting future impacts on soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in agroecosystems. Here, we used a field experiment to quantify the combined effects of climat...

More than half of all life on Earth lives belowground and regulates a wide range of ecosystem functions via their diverse trophic interactions. However, information on how trophic diversity of soil animals varies across functional groups and major environmental gradients is lacking. Here, we use stable isotope analysis (13C/12C and 15N/14N ratios)...

The increasing prevalence of drought events in grasslands and shrublands worldwide potentially has impacts on soil organic carbon (SOC). We leveraged the International Drought Experiment to study how SOC, including particulate organic carbon (POC) and mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) concentrations, responds to extreme drought treatments (1...

For nature conservation and planning, terrestrial ecosystems are commonly classified based on their plant communities. Although soils are fundamental to ecosystem functioning, ecosystem classifications based on soil organisms are rare, and it is poorly understood whether their assemblage compositions follow existing classification schemes. We exami...

Earth observation data is key for monitoring vegetation dynamics across temporal and spatial scales. The most widely used method to estimate vegetation properties from Earth observation data is vegetation indices. However, temporal dynamics in vertical leaf angles can strongly alter reflectance signals and, hence, vegetation indices. Here, we deriv...

Increasing species diversity frequently enhances ecosystem functioning - a pattern strengthened with ecosystem age. It has been suggested that strengthened responses over time may be due to community assembly processes and cumulative effects over the history of interactions between and among plant and soil communities. However, most soil studies ar...

Estimating the overall number of species for a given taxon is a central issue in ecology and conservation biology. It should be particularly topical in the case of soil organisms, which represent the majority of known species, but it still suffers from a considerable taxonomic knowledge deficit. We propose here an estimation of the global number of...

The underlying processes of plant‐microbe associations particularly their interactions with their mycorrhizal fungal partners have been extensively studied. However, considerably less is known about the consequences of tree‐tree interactions on rooting zone soil microbiota when tree species of different mycorrhizal type (myco‐type) grow together as...

The bidirectional relationship between plant species richness and community biomass is often variable and poorly resolved in natural grassland ecosystems1–3, impeding progress in predicting impacts of environmental changes. In contrast, most biological communities have lognormal species abundance distributions (e.g., biomass, cover, number of indiv...

Diversity and community composition of earthworms, key drivers of ecosystem functions, are increasingly threatened by global change, including climate and land-use change. However, empirical evidence for interactions of these concurrent drivers in affecting earthworm communities is scarce. Here, we investigated the effects of an experimentally impo...

Soils, just like all other ecosystem compartments, change over time and, consequently, conditions for soil‐inhabiting organisms are also changing, affecting their composition and diversity. Soil biodiversity is a critical component of ecosystems that supports many essential ecosystem functions and services, such as nutrient cycling, carbon sequestr...

Ecosystem functioning depends on biodiversity at multiple trophic levels, yet relationships between multitrophic diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality have been poorly explored, with studies often focusing on individual trophic levels and functions and on specific ecosystem types. Here, we show that plant diversity can affect ecosystem functio...

Soil health is expected to be of key importance for plant growth and ecosystem functioning. However, whether soil health is linked to primary productivity across environmental gradients and land-use types remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conducted a pan-European field study including 588 sites from 27 countries to investigate the...

Terrestrial ecosystems are subjected to multiple global changes simultaneously. Yet, how an increasing number of global changes impact the resistance of ecosystems to global change remains virtually unknown. Here we present a global synthesis including 14,000 observations from seven ecosystem services (functions and biodiversity), as well as data f...

The widely observed negative scaling relationship between organism size and abundance is predicted to have a universal −0.75 scaling exponent across all life forms. However, factors influencing frequently observed deviations from this exponent, such as ecosystem succession and organism traits, remain poorly understood. We explore the dependence of...

Earth is facing a rapid change in biodiversity, posing significant threats to human health and ecosystem stability. Concurrently, increased urbanization is causing humans, especially children in urban areas, to grow more disconnected from nature, resulting in a lack of perceptual and learning capabilities in nature-based domains. Early childhood ex...

Global change is associated with variable shifts in the annual production of aboveground plant biomass, suggesting localized sensitivities with unclear causal origins. Combining remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index data since the 1980s with contemporary field data from 84 grasslands on 6 continents, we show a widening divergence i...

Aim Understanding the mechanisms promoting resilience in plant communities is crucial in times of increasing disturbance and global environmental change. Here, we present the first meta‐analysis evaluating the relationship between functional diversity and resilience of plant communities. Specifically, we tested whether the resilience of plant commu...

Mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) constitutes a major fraction of global soil carbon and is assumed less sensitive to climate than particulate organic carbon (POC) due to protection by minerals. Despite its importance for long-term carbon storage, the response of MAOC to changing climates in drylands, which cover more than 40% of the global...

Microbial communities can be found nearly everywhere on Earth, from within our own intestines to lakes and soil. These microbiomes are dynamic and sensitive to environmental disturbances, which are only becoming more common as t he impact of human activity grows. To better understand exactly how microbiomes in different environments respond to disr...

Although belowground invasive species are probably equally widespread and as important as their aboveground counterparts, they remain understudied, and their impacts are likely to be stronger when these invaders act as ecosystem engineers and differ functionally from native species. This is the case in regions historically devoid of native earthwor...

Forbs (“wildflowers”) are important contributors to grassland biodiversity and services, but they are vulnerable to environmental changes that affect their coexistence with grasses. In a factorial experiment at 94 sites on 6 continents, we tested the global generality of several broad predictions arising from previous studies: (1) Forb cover and ri...

The timing and order of species arrival have been shown to be a significant factor in the assembly of biotic communities. Therefore, understanding priority effects, which refer to the impact of an early‐arriving species on a later‐arriving one, can help us better predict community assembly processes. However, little is known about the role of phylo...

The frequency of consecutive drought years is predicted to increase due to climate change. These droughts have strong negative impacts on forest ecosystems. Mixing tree species is proposed to increase the drought resistance and resilience of tree communities. However, this promising diversity effect has not yet been investigated under extreme droug...

Ecologists have long debated the universality of the energetic equivalence rule (EER), which posits that population energy use should be invariant with average body size due to negative size–density scaling. We explored size–density and size–energy use scaling across 183 geographically–distributed soil invertebrate food webs to investigate the univ...

Drought is a major stressor to soil microbial communities, and the intensification of climate change is predicted to increase hydric stress worldwide in the coming decades. As a possible mitigating factor for the consequences of prolonged drought periods, above and belowground biodiversity can increase ecosystem resistance and resilience by improvi...

Recent droughts have strongly impacted forest ecosystems and are projected to increase in frequency, intensity, and duration in the future together with continued warming. While evidence suggests that tree diversity can regulate drought impacts in natural forests, few studies examine whether mixed tree plantations are more resistant to the impacts...

International commitments advocate large-scale forest restoration as a nature-based solution to climate change mitigation through carbon (C) sequestration. Mounting evidence suggests that mixed compared to monospecific planted forests may store more C, exhibit lower susceptibility to climate extremes and offer a broader range of ecosystem services....

The capacity of forests to sequester carbon in both above‐ and belowground compartments is a crucial tool to mitigate rising atmospheric carbon concentrations. Belowground carbon storage in forests is strongly linked to soil microbial communities that are the key drivers of soil heterotrophic respiration, organic matter decomposition and thus nutri...

Fauna is highly abundant and diverse in soils worldwide, but surprisingly little is known about how it affects soil organic matter stabilization. Here, we review how the ecological strategies of a multitude of soil faunal taxa can affect the formation and persistence of labile (particulate organic matter, POM) and stabilized soil organic matter (mi...

Knowledge of plant species distributions is essential for various application fields, such as nature conservation, agriculture, and forestry. Remote sensing data, especially high-resolution orthoimages from unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs), paired with novel pattern-recognition methods, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), enable accurate...

Soil is central to the complex interplay among biodiversity, climate, and society. This paper examines the interconnectedness of soil biodiversity, climate change, and societal impacts, emphasizing the urgent need for integrated solutions. Human‐induced biodiversity loss and climate change intensify environmental degradation, threatening human well...

The relationship of plant diversity and several ecosystem functions strengthens over time. This suggests that the restructuring of biotic interactions in the process of a community’s assembly and the associated changes in function differ between species-rich and species-poor communities. An important component of these changes is the feedback betwe...

Decades of studies have demonstrated links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, yet the generality of the relationships and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, especially for forest ecosystems. Using 11 tree‐diversity experiments, we tested tree species richness–community productivity relationships and the role of arbuscular (AM) o...

The currently dominant types of land management are threatening the multifunctionality of ecosystems, which is vital for human well-being. Here, we present a novel ecological-economic assessment of how multifunctionality of agroecosystems in Central Germany depends on land-use type and climate. Our analysis includes 14 ecosystem variables in a larg...

Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well‐being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and man...

Background and Aims Litter decomposition is a major determinant of carbon (C) and nutrient cycling in ecosystems, and contributes to soil organic carbon (SOC) formation. Ongoing global changes are exacerbating biodiversity loss, potentially elevating foliar fungal pathogen infections and consequently impacting litter quality and quantity. However,...

Climate change will affect the way biodiversity influences the stability of plant communities. Although biodiversity, associated species asynchrony, and species stability could enhance community stability, the understanding of potential nonlinear shifts in the biodiversity–stability relationship across a wide range of aridity (measured as the aridi...

Soil is the basis for life on Earth as we know it. Healthy and stable soil is a prerequisite for well-functioning terrestrial ecosystems and has, thus, been proposed to play a key role in plant diversity–ecosystem functioning relationships. The overall objective of this sub-project is to study multidimensional soil stability as affected by plant di...

Soil ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) play a crucial role in converting ammonia to nitrite, thereby mobilizing reactive nitrogen species into their soluble form, with a significant impact on nitrogen losses from terrestrial soils. Yet, our knowledge regarding their diversity and functions remains limited. In this study, we reconstructed 97 high-qual...

Background Disturbances alter the diversity and composition of microbial communities. Yet a generalized empirical assessment of microbiome responses to disturbance across different environments is needed to understand the factors driving microbiome recovery, and the role of the environment in driving these patterns. Results To this end, we combine...

With over one‐third of terrestrial net primary productivity transferring to the litter layer annually, the carbon release from litter serves as a crucial valve in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, few quantitative global projections of litter carbon release rate in response to climate change exist. Here, we combined a global folia...

Understanding the complex interactions between trees and fungi is crucial for forest ecosystem management, yet the influence of tree mycorrhizal types, species identity, and diversity on tree‐tree interactions and their root‐associated fungal communities remains poorly understood. Our study addresses this gap by investigating root‐associated fungal...