Oliver Schweiger

Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung | UFZ · Department of Community Ecology

Sustainable agriculture requires balancing crop yields with the effects of pesticides on non-target organisms, such as bees and other crop pollinators. Field studies demonstrated that agricultural use of neonicotinoid insecticides can negatively affect wild bee species1,2, leading to restrictions on these compounds3. However, besides neonicotinoids...

At large scales, the mechanisms underpinning stability in natural communities may vary in importance due to changes in species composition, mean abundance, and species richness. Here we link species characteristics (niche positions) and community characteristics (richness and abundance) to evaluate the importance of stability mechanisms in 156 butt...

To provide a complete portrayal of the multiple factors negatively impacting insects in agricultural landscapes it is necessary to assess the concurrent incidence, magnitude, and interactions among multiple stressors over substantial biogeographical scales. Trans-national ecological field investigations with wide-ranging stakeholders typically enco...

Aim It is important to understand the factors affecting community stability because ecosystem function is increasingly at risk from biodiversity loss. Here, we evaluate how a key factor, the position of local environmental conditions within the thermal range of the species, influences the stability of butterfly communities at a continental scale....

Viruses are omnipresent, yet the knowledge on drivers of viral prevalence in wild host populations is often limited. Biotic factors, such as sympatric managed host species, as well as abiotic factors, such as climatic variables, are likely to impact viral prevalence. Managed and wild bees, which harbor several multi-host viruses with a mostly fecal...

Human-induced disturbances to ecosystems cause a direct loss of biodiversity, and also alter the inherent processes that shape ecosystems even after the main disturbance has ceased. Therefore, is it important to understand the ongoing consequences of past and present land use practices on both above- and belowground components of agroecosystems. Ou...

In order to synthesize changes in pollinating insect communities across space and time, it is necessary to understand whether, and how, sampling methods influence assessments of community patterns. We compared how two common sampling methods-yellow combined flight traps and net sampling-influence our understanding of the species richness, abundance...

Single page summary of Vanderplank et al (2021) - contains a QR code for accessing the paper

Current global change substantially threatens pollinators, which directly impacts the pollination services underpinning the stability, structure and functioning of ecosystems. Among these threats, many synergistic drivers such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, increasing use of agrochemicals, decreasing resource diversity as well as climate...

Multiple global change pressures, and their interplay, cause plant-pollinator extinctions and modify species assemblages and interactions. This may alter the risks of pathogen host shifts, intra- or interspecific pathogen spread, and emergence of novel population or community epidemics. Flowers are hubs for pathogen transmission. Consequently, the...

Since 1989, China has established a system of powerful laws and regulations aimed to preserve its rich natural flora and fauna. However, this legislative framework still has shortcomings, in terms of sentencing standards across related crimes and the extent of scientific basis for sentences. Here, we review Chinese biodiversity protection laws and...

Trait-based analyses explaining the different responses of species and communities to environmental changes are increasing in frequency. European butterflies are an indicator group that responds rapidly to environmental changes with extensive citizen science contributions to documenting changes of abundance and distribution. Species traits have bee...

• Land management is known to have consequences for biodiversity; however, our synthetic understanding of its effects is limited due to highly variable results across studies, which vary in the focal taxa and spatial grain considered, as well as the response variables reported. Such synthetic knowledge is necessary for management of agroecosystems...

Aim Occurrence data are fundamental to macroecology, but accuracy is often compromised when multiple units are lumped together (e.g., in recently separated cryptic species or in citizen science records). Using amalgamated data leads to inaccuracy in species mapping, to biased beta‐diversity assessments and to potentially erroneously predicted respo...

Methodological research on species distribution modelling (SDM) has so far largely focused on the choice of appropriate modelling algorithms and variable selection approaches, but the consequences of choosing amongst different sources of environmental data has scarcely been investigated. Bioclimatic variables are commonly used as predictors in SDMs...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are nonmaterial benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. The CES sub-categories cover a wide range of domains (e.g. recreation, conservation of cultural heritage, human-nature relations). The CES concept has been proposed to acknowledge the nonmaterial values linking people and nature in social-ecological syste...

With the aim of supporting ecological analyses in butterflies, the third most species-rich superfamily of Lepidoptera, this paper presents the first time-calibrated phylogeny of all 496 extant butterfly species in Europe, including 18 very localised endemics for which no public DNA sequences had been available previously. It is based on a concatena...

The European Union's Natura 2000 (N2000) is among the largest international networks of protected areas. One of its aims is to secure the status of a predetermined set of (targeted) bird and butterfly species. However, nontarget species may also benefit from N2000. We evaluated how the terrestrial component of this network affects the abundance of...

Functional traits offer promising avenues to investigate how community composition and diversity define ecosystem functioning and service delivery. In recent years, many empirical studies on the importance of functional traits for ecosystem service provisioning have been undertaken, but a general understanding and synthesis of results is lacking fo...

Biodiversity can be characterised across several dimensions, which are crucial for the evaluation of ecosystemservices. Functional diversity, a key aspect of biodiversity, provides a more realistic characterisation of thefunctioning of ecological communities than only studying their taxonomic diversity. The relevance of functionalecology studies ha...

Aim Niche‐based models often ignore spatial variation in the climatic niche of a species across its occupied range and the related variation in the response to changing climate conditions. This assumption may lead to inaccurate predictions of species distribution shifts under climate change. Models have been developed to address this issue, but mos...

Urbanisation is an important global driver of biodiversity change, negatively impacting some species groups whilst providing opportunities for others. Yet its impact on ecosystem services is poorly investigated. Here, using a replicated experimental design, we test how Central European cities impact flying insects and the ecosystem service of polli...

With the aim of supporting ecological analyses in butterflies, the third most species-rich superfamily of Lepidoptera, this paper presents the first time-calibrated phylogeny of all 496 extant butterfly species in Europe, including 18 very localized endemics for which no public DNA sequences had been available previously. It is based on a concatena...

Atmospheric nitrogen deposition and other sources of environmental eutrophication have increased substantially over the past century worldwide, notwithstanding the recent declining trends in Europe. Despite the recognized susceptibility of plants to eutrophication, few studies evaluated how impacts propagate to consumers, such as pollinators. Here...

Climate change and biological invasions are two major global environmental challenges. Both may interact, e.g. via altered impact and distribution of invasive alien species. Even though invasive species play a key role for compromising the health of honey bees, the impact of climate change on the severity of such species is still unknown. The small...

How species respond to environmental change is a fundamental question in ecology and species traits can help to tackle this question. In this study, we analyze how the functional structure of species assemblages changes with selected environmental variables along an elevational gradient. In particular, we used species traits of local butterfly comm...

In times where biodiversity is highly endangered, only little of recent biodiversity research is implemented in school education. The collaboration of scientists and educators provides the opportunity to fill this gap. The learning environment SITAS (SImulation of buTterflIes and scenArios for Schools) was developed that combines an educational sof...

Aim Ecological inferences drawn from studies on niche dynamics of invasive species are often limited due to difficulties in disentangling evolutionary adaptations of the fundamental niche from demographic and interspecific processes shaping the realized niche. We used Ageratina adenophora, an invasive plant with restricted evolutionary potential to...

Aim Conventional species distribution models (SDMs) usually focus on the species level but disregard intraspecific variability. Phylogeographic structure and evolutionary significant units (ESU) have been proposed as pragmatic proxies to incorporate intraspecific differentiation in SDMs. Nevertheless, the efficiency of using these proxies in SDMs h...

Open access at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin_Schaedler/publication/330772906_Rice_Ecosystem_Services_in_South-East_Asia_The_LEGATO_Project_Its_Approaches_and_Main_Results_with_a_Focus_on_Biocontrol_Services/links/5c5befc445851582c3d45b99/Rice-Ecosystem-Services-in-South-East-Asia-The-LEGATO-Project-Its-Approaches-and-Main-Results-with...

Pollination of wild and crop plants by animal pollinators is a key ecosystem service that is important to human welfare. Across Europe, climatic conditions are the most important drivers of occurrence and richness of pollinators followed by land cover and soil conditions. However, the example of recent range shifts of important pollinators such as...

Transect counts are one of the most popular approaches to assess and monitor butterfly diversity, especially with the background of biodiversity loss. This method was developed in Europe, but its transferability is seldom tested across the world. To assess transferability, we compared butterfly richness estimates based on transect counts in Spain,...

Aim To assess the effectiveness of protected areas in preventing biodiversity decline. We first test whether species richness of butterfly assemblages is higher within European Natura 2000 (N2000) sites than in their surroundings. We then assess temporal trends in butterfly richness and test whether these trends differ inside and outside the N2000...

Editorial

Species range shifts under climate change have predominantly been projected by models correlating species observations with climatic conditions. However, geographic range shifting may depend on biotic factors such as demography, dispersal and species interactions. Recently suggested hybrid models include these factors. However, parameterization of...

The ecology of terrestrial and marine ecosystems has been studied for over a hundred years and human utilization of both realms has been documented going back hundreds or even thousands of years.

Body size latitudinal clines have been widley explained by the Bergmann's rule in homeothermic vertebrates. However, there is no general consensus in poikilotherms organisms in particular in insects that represent the large majority of wildlife. Among them, bees are a highly diverse pollinators group with high economic and ecological value. Neverth...

Aim Species distribution models built with geographically restricted data often fail to capture the full range of conditions experienced by species across their entire distribution area. Using such models to predict distribution shifts under future environmental change may, therefore, produce biased projections. However, restricted‐scale models hav...

Loss of habitat area and diversity poses a threat to communities of wild pollinators and flowering plants in agricultural landscapes. Pollinators, such as wild bees, and insect-pollinated plants are two groups of organisms that closely interact. Nevertheless, it is still not clear how species richness and functional diversity, in terms of pollinati...

Assessing species richness and diversity on the basis of standardised field sampling effort represents a cost- and time-consuming method. Satellite remote sensing (RS) can help overcome these limitations because it facilitates the collection of larger amounts of spatial data using cost-effective techniques. RS information is hence increasingly anal...

Pearsons’s correlation coefficients between the test variables (a) and remaining variables after removing variables with coefficients │c│≥ 0.7 (b). (DOCX)

Pearsons’s correlation coefficients for all pairs of remaining test variable and distance class (100 and 1000 m). (DOCX)

Differences between years (upper two rows) and locations (lower two rows) within the biodiversity variables per data set (df). (DOCX)

Spline correlograms for the global fitted models as per model selection for each response variable of (a) the bumble-bees data set (bb), (b) the solitary-bees data set (sb), and (c) the wild bee data set (nohb). (DOCX)

Workflow of the study. (DOCX)

Pearsons’s correlation coefficients for all pairs of distance classes per test variable. (DOCX)

Pearson’s correlation of the early and late trapping season for the biodiversity variables per data frame (df). (DOCX)

Correlation between bee count (BC), Shannon’s diversity (SD) and species richness (SpR) variables. (DOCX)

Differences between trapping seasons (2010–23013) within the biodiversity variables per data set (df). (DOCX)

Model comparison for predictors of biodiversity in bumble bees (bb), solitary bees (sb), and all wild bees (nohb). (DOCX)

Identifying patterns in the effects of temperature on species' population abundances could help develop a general framework for predicting the consequences of climate change across different communities and realms. We used long-term population time series data from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species communitieswithin central Europe to comp...

Aim Agricultural intensification and urbanization are important drivers of biodiversity change in Europe. Different aspects of bee community diversity vary in their sensitivity to these pressures, as well as independently influencing ecosystem service provision (pollination). To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of human impacts on bee dive...

Responses of hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae) to climate change remain mostly unexplored. Here, for the first time, we investigate the impact of climate change on both presence/absence and abundances of hoverfly species. We used generalized linear models to analyse the relationships of climatic and soil variables with the occurrence and abundance of...

ContextThe abundance of important providers of ecosystem services such as wild bees likely increases with landscape heterogeneity, but may also fluctuate across the flowering season following varying weather conditions. Objectives In the present study, we investigated the combined effect of landscape heterogeneity and intra-annual variability in te...

Climate change, land-use change, pollution and exploitation are among the main drivers of species’ population trends; however, their relative importance is much debated. We used a unique collection of over 1,000 local population time series in 22 communities across terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms within central Europe to compare the impac...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Cross-system studies on the response of different ecosystems to global change will support our understanding of ecological changes. Synoptic views on the planet's two main realms, the marine and terrestrial, however, are rare, owing to the development of rather disparate research communities. We combined questionnaires and a literature review to in...

Climate change is already affecting terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity and is projected to become an even more important driver of biodiversity and ecosystem change in the future (Kovats et al., 2014; Urban, 2015). Climate change will have a broad range of positive and negative impacts on biodiversity at genetic, species (e.g. plant and animal...

Impacts of climate change on individual species are increasingly well documented, but we lack understanding of how these effects propagate through ecological communities. Here we combine species distribution models with ecological network analyses to test potential impacts of climate change on 4700 plant and animal species in pollination and seeddi...

Supplementary Figures and Supplementary Tables

Network metrics, climatic niche breadth and climatic suitability change. For 295 plant and 414 animal species, we provide information on plant and animal taxonomy (class, order, family), the effective number of interaction partners, complementary specialization d' (uniqueness of interaction partners relative to other species [range 0-1]), range siz...

Metadata of 13 mutualistic networks. Given are network type, geographic location, habitat type, sampling duration and the number of visitation events, plant and animal species in each network. We only included species in the networks for which occurrence data were available and provide the number of excluded plant and animal species for the study t...

The occurrence of the Dusky Large Blue Butterfly (Maculinea nausithous) critically depends on the availability of two key resources: the Great Burnet (Sanguisorba officinalis) as primary nectar source for adults, for egg laying and early larval development, and the host ant Myrmica rubra as the food of late instar larvae. Thus, their distributions...

Aim Biological invasions are today the second‐largest global threat for biodiversity. Once introduced, exotic plant species can modify ecosystem composition, structure and dynamics, eventually driving native species to local extinction. Among the groups of organisms, most likely to be directly affected by exotic invasive plants are herbivorous inse...