About
270
Publications
78,360
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
12,829
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am not reading any communication through ResearchGate.
If you wish reprints or any other information, then contact me directly by email.
Publications
Publications (270)
Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of climate extremes. Forests may buffer such extreme events by creating their own microclimate below their canopy via cooling hot and insulating against cold macroclimate air temperatures. This buffering capacity of forests may be increased by tree diversity and may itself maintain forest fun...
In plant communities, diversity often increases productivity and functioning, but the specific underlying drivers are difficult to identify. Most ecological theories attribute positive diversity effects to complementary niches occupied by different species or genotypes. However, the specific nature of niche complementarity often remains unclear, in...
Numerous biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments have shown that plant community productivity typically increases with species diversity. In these studies, diversity is generally quantified using metrics of taxonomic, phylogenetic, or functional differences among community members. Research has also shown that the relationships between...
Crop variety mixtures can provide many benefits, including pathogen suppression and increased yield and yield stability. However, these benefits do not necessarily occur in all mixtures, and the benefits of diversity may be compromised by disadvantages due to increased crop heterogeneity. In-field development of mixtures by assembling many combinat...
Aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are tightly connected via spatial flows of organisms and resources. Such land-water linkages integrate biodiversity across ecosystems and suggest a spatial association of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity. However, knowledge about the extent of this spatial association is limited. By combining satellite remote...
Games as a didactic tool (e. g., puzzles) are gaining recognition in environmental education to promote skill development, but also to develop a specific understanding of the natural world. However, a children’s puzzle containing representations of nature may unwillingly lead to “misconceptions” of biodiversity themes and processes, and an over-sim...
In plant communities, diversity often increases community productivity and functioning, but the specific underlying drivers are difficult to identify. Most ecological theories attribute the positive diversity effects to complementary niches occupied by different species or genotypes. However, the type of niche complementarity often remains unclear,...
Interspecific niche complementarity is a key mechanism posited to explain positive species richness–productivity relationships in plant communities. However, the exact nature of the niche dimensions that plant species partition remains poorly known.
Species may partition abiotic resources that limit their growth, but species may also be specialized...
Soil fungi are a major factor maintaining plant diversity and productivity, but the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. Based on a biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiment in southeast China, we evaluated the impacts of root-associated soil fungi on plant total, above- and belowground biomass production in monocultures and in di...
Aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are tightly connected via spatial flows of organisms and resources. Such land-water linkages integrate biodiversity across ecosystems and suggest a spatial association of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity. However, knowledge about this spatial extent is limited. By combining satellite remote sensing (RS) and en...
1. Trait-based ecology holds the promise to explain how plant communities work, for example, how functional diversity may support community productivity. However, so far it has been difficult to combine field-based approaches assessing traits at the level of plant individuals with limited spatial coverage and approaches using remote sensing (RS) wi...
Variety mixtures can provide a range of benefits for both the crop and the environment. Their utility for the suppression of pathogens, especially in small grain crops, is well established and has seen some remarkable successes. However, despite decades of academic interest in the topic, commercial efforts to develop, release and promote variety mi...
In this perspective article we start from the theories of constructivism and conceptual change within the field of education to develop and present hypotheses about how understandings of biodiversity and diversity more generally are formed. We argue that extrinsic and circumstantial elements from everyday experiences are relevant in shaping underst...
Shifts in the frequency and magnitude of rain events (precipitation patterns) associated with climate change may impact ecosystem nitrogen and carbon cycling through effects on plant physiology and soil microbial activity. Here, we determined how the combination of temporal irrigation distribution and N supply affects plant-microbial C and N dynami...
Plant and soil microbial diversities are linked through a range of interactions, including the exchange of carbon and nutrients but also herbivory and pathogenic effects. Over time, associations between plant communities and their soil microbiota may strengthen and become more specific, resulting in stronger associations between plant and soil micr...
The interaction of shortwave radiation with vegetation drives basic processes of the biosphere, such as primary productivity, species interactions through light competition, and energy fluxes between the atmosphere, vegetation, and soil. Here, we aim to understand the effects of leaf functional trait diversity on canopy light absorption. We focus o...
Plant and soil microbial diversity are linked through a range of interactions, including the exchange of carbon and nutrients but also herbivory and pathogenic effects. Over time, associations between plant communities and their soil microbiota may strengthen and become more specific, resulting in stronger associations between plant and soil microb...
In this perspective article we start from the theories of constructivism and conceptual change within the field of education to develop and present hypotheses about how understandings of biodiversity and diversity more generally are formed. We argue that extrinsic and circumstantial elements from everyday experiences are relevant in shaping underst...
Plant traits reflect growth strategies and trade-offs in response to environmental conditions. Because of climate warming, plant traits might
change, altering ecosystem functions and vegetation–climate interactions. Despite important feedbacks of plant trait changes in tundra ecosystems
with regional climate, with a key role for shrubs, information...
Earth is home to over 350,000 vascular plant species that differ in their traits in innumerable ways. A key challenge is to pre- dict how natural or anthropogenically driven changes in the identity, abundance and diversity of co-occurring plant species drive important ecosystem-level properties such as biomass production or carbon storage. Here, we...
Anaerobic nitrate-dependent Fe(II) oxidation (NDFeO) is widespread in various aquatic environments and plays a major role in iron and nitrogen redox dynamics. However, evidence for truly enzymatic, autotrophic NDFeO remains limited, with alternative explanations involving the coupling of heterotrophic denitrification with the abiotic oxidation of s...
Late-spring frosts (LSFs) affect the performance of plants and animals across the world’s temperate and boreal zones, but despite their ecological and economic impact on agriculture and forestry, the geographic distribution and evolutionary impact of these frost events are poorly understood. Here, we analyze LSFs between 1959 and 2017 and the resis...
Alpine soils are warming strongly, leading to profound alterations in carbon cycling and greenhouse gas budgets, mediated via the soil microbiome. To explore microbial responses to global warming, we incubated eight alpine soils between 4 and 35 °C and linked the temperature dependency of bacterial growth with alterations in community structures an...
Research of the past decades has shown that biodiversity is a fundamental driver of ecosystem functioning. However, most of this biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) research focused on experimental communities on small areas where environmental context was held constant. Whether the established BEF relationships also apply to natural or manage...
Unprecedented species loss in diverse forests indicates the urgent need to test its consequences for ecosystem functioning. However, experimental evaluation based on realistic extinction scenarios is lacking. Using species interaction networks we introduce an approach to separate effects of node loss (reduced species number) from effects of link lo...
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments have predominantly focused on communities of higher organisms, in particular plants, with comparably little known to date about the relevance of biodiversity for microbially-driven biogeochemical processes. Methanotrophic bacteria play a key role in Earth's methane (CH4) cycle by removing atmosph...
Abstract. Anaerobic nitrate-dependent Fe(II) oxidation (NDFeO) is widespread in various aquatic environments, and plays a major role in iron and nitrogen redox dynamics. However, evidence for truly enzymatic, autotrophic NDFeO remains limited, with alternative explanations involving coupling of heterotrophic denitrification with abiotic oxidation o...
Abstract. Plant traits reflect growth strategies and trade-offs in response to environmental conditions. Because of climate warming, plant traits might adapt, altering ecosystem functions and vegetation–climate interactions. Despite important feedbacks of plant trait changes in tundra ecosystems with regional climate, with a key role for shrubs, in...
Biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments have shown that local species richness promotes ecosystem functioning and stability. Whether this also applies under real-world conditions is still debated. Here, we focus on larger scales of space, time and ecological organization. We develop a quasi-experimental design in which we relate land-c...
Earth is home to over 350,000 vascular plant species ¹ that differ in their traits in innumerable ways. Yet, a handful of functional traits can help explaining major differences among species in photosynthetic rate, growth rate, reproductive output and other aspects of plant performance 2–6 . A key challenge, coined “the Holy Grail” in ecology, is...
Light-related interactions can increase productivity in tree-species mixtures compared with monocultures due to higher stand-level absorption of photosynthetically active radiation (APAR) or light-use efficiency (LUE). However, the effects of different light-related interactions, and their relative importance, have rarely been quantified. Here, mea...
Leaf litter decomposition is closely linked to soil nutrient cycling. Both vary with environmental conditions, leaf litter diversity, faunal decomposer community and leaf litter chemistry. Polyphenols, i.e. phenolics and tannins, are important secondary metabolites in leaf litter and are considered a major impediment to whole-leaf decomposition. Wh...
Historic yield advances in the major crops have to a large part been achieved by selection for improved productivity of groups of plant individuals such as high-density stands. Research suggests that such improved group productivity depends on “cooperative” traits (e.g. erect leaves, short stems) that – while beneficial to the group – decrease indi...
Technologies for crop breeding have become increasingly sophisticated, yet it remains unclear whether these advances are sufficient to meet future demands. A major challenge with current crop selection regimes is that they are often based on individual performance. This tends to select for plants with “selfish” traits, which leads to a yield loss w...
Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration should stimulate biomass production directly via biochemical stimulation of carbon assimilation, and indirectly via water savings caused by increased plant water-use efficiency. Because of these water savings, the CO2 fertilization effect (CFE) should be stronger at drier sites, yet large differences...
Yang et al have raised criticism that the results reported by us would not be relevant for natural forests. We argue that productivity is positively related to species richness also in subtropical natural forests, and that both the species pools and the range of tree species richness used in our experiment are representative of many natural forests...
Soil respiration plays a crucial role in global carbon cycling. While the response of soil respiration to abiotic drivers like soil temperature and moisture is fairly well understood, less is known about the effects of biotic drivers, such as plant above- and belowground productivity or plant diversity, and their interactions with abiotic drivers o...
Manually measured soil respiration (SR), soil temperature (ST) and soil moisture (SM).
(CSV)
Assimilated continuous soil moisture (SM) data set.
(CSV)
Cumulative soil respiration and biotic parameters.
(CSV)
Continuously measured (at 6 of the 19 sites) soil temperature (ST) and soil moisture (SM).
(CSV)
Soil respiration (SR) models per plot for each site.
Both years were fitted together. The SR function (Eq 1) was fitted for each plot at each site by a constrained non-linear regression, E0 was determined over all data and thereafter kept constant (E0 = 289 K). SRref, a and b are the fitted model coefficients. RSS shows the minimized residual sum o...
Modelled soil respiration (SR) data set for the 19 sites.
(CSV)
Assimilated continuous soil temperature (ST) data set.
(CSV)
Despite extensive evidence that biodiversity promotes plant community productivity, progress towards understanding the mechanistic basis of this effect remains slow, impeding the development of predictive ecological theory and agricultural applications. Here, we analysed non-additive interactions between genetically divergent Arabidopsis accessions...
Abstract Background The production and subsequent turnover of aboveground litter is an important process in the ecosystem carbon (C) cycle. Litterfall links above- and belowground processes by transferring organic material to the soil where it becomes available to heterotrophs, fueling nutrient cycling. Little is known about how litter fluxes respo...
Semi-terrestrial soils such as floodplain soils are
considered potential hot spots of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. Microhabitats
in the soil – such as within and outside of aggregates, in the detritusphere, and/or in
the rhizosphere – are considered to promote and preserve specific redox conditions. Yet
our understanding of the relative effects o...
Biodiversity experiments have shown that species loss reduces ecosystem functioning in
grassland. To test whether this result can be extrapolated to forests, the main contributors to
terrestrial primary productivity, requires large-scale experiments.We manipulated tree species
richness by planting more than 150,000 trees in plots with 1 to 16 speci...
Despite extensive evidence that biodiversity promotes plant community productivity, progress towards understanding the mechanistic basis of this effect remains slow, impeding the development of predictive ecological theory and agricultural applications. Here, we analysed non-additive interactions between genetically divergent Arabidopsis accessions...
Forest ecosystems are an integral component of the global carbon cycle as they take up and release large amounts of C over short time periods (C flux) or accumulate it over longer time periods (C stock). However, there remains uncertainty about whether and in which direction C fluxes and in particular C stocks may differ between forests of high ver...
Human-induced biodiversity change impairs ecosystem functions crucial to human well-being. However, the consequences of this change for ecosystem multifunctionality are poorly understood beyond effects of plant species loss, particularly in regions with high biodiversity across trophic levels. Here we adopt a multitrophic perspective to analyze how...
Semi–terrestrial soils such as floodplain soils are considered potential hotspots of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. Microhabitats in the soil, such as within and outside of aggregates, in the detritusphere, and/or in the rhizosphere, are considered to promote and preserve specific redox conditions. Yet, our understanding of the relative effects of...
The extent to which plants can reduce nutrient concentrations in soil and thereby compete with others may increase with nutrient mobility. Hyphae of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi ( AMF ) can extend the soil volume from which plants acquire phosphorus (P), thus increasing competition for these resources with neighbours. In this study, we tested wheth...
Biodiversity enhances ecosystem functions such as biomass production and nutrient cycling. Although the majority of the terrestrial biodiversity is hidden in soils, very little is known about the importance of the diversity of microbial communities for soil functioning. Here, we tested effects of biodiversity on the functioning of methanotrophs, a...
Forest cover in Switzerland and other European countries has gradually increased in the past century. Our knowledge of the impacts of forest expansion and development on soil organic carbon (SOC) storage is, however, limited due to uncertainties in land-use history and lack of historical soil samples. We investigated the effect of forest age on cur...
Abstract
During leaf litter decomposition, nutrients are released, can be transferred among different litter species, are metabolized by soil organisms and are taken up by plants again. However, it remains unclear to which extent leaf litter species richness affects these processes of nutrient cycling, and whether effects on one of those processes...
Global environmental change and biodiversity loss are closely linked through different feedback mechanisms. The University of Zurich Research Priority Programme on ‘Global Change and Biodiversity’ approach is to work with interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity to integrate mechanisms of interactions, feedback and scale and improve our understa...
Forest ecosystems contribute substantially to global terrestrial primary productivity and climate regulation, but, in contrast to grasslands, experimental evidence for a positive biodiversity-productivity relationship in highly diverse forests is still lacking ¹ . Here, we provide such evidence from a large forest biodiversity experiment with a nov...
