Pierre Gaüzère

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine (UMR 5553)

Aim We disentangle three facets of species commonness (local abundance, geographical range size, degree of habitat generalization) to identify how species segregate along these axes and how each of these facets determines the relative functional originality of each species (i.e. the mean trait distance of a species with others). At the community le...

The local spatial congruence between climate changes and community changes has rarely been studied over large areas. We proposed one of the first comprehensive frameworks tracking local changes in community composition related to climate changes. First, we investigated whether and how 12 years of changes in the local composition of bird communities...

The ongoing biodiversity crisis presents a complex challenge for ecological science. Despite a consensus on general biodiversity decline, identifying clear trends remains difficult due to variability in data, methodologies, and scales of analysis. To enhance our understanding of ongoing biodiversity changes and address discrepancies in biodiversity...

Land use intensification favours particular trophic groups which can induce architectural changes in food webs. These changes can impact ecosystem functions, services, stability and resilience. However, the imprint of land management intensity on food‐web architecture has rarely been characterized across large spatial extent and various land uses....

Biotic interactions are widely recognised as the backbone of ecological communities, but how best to study them is a subject of intense debate, especially at macro‐ecological scales. While some researchers claim that biotic interactions need to be observed directly, others use proxies and statistical approaches to infer them. Despite this ambiguity...

The Anthropocene is characterized by a rapid pace of environmental change and is causing a multitude of biotic responses, including those that affect the spatial distribution of species. Lagged responses are frequent and species distributions and assemblages are consequently pushed into a disequilibrium state. How the characteristics of environment...

Recent work has shown that evaluating functional trait distinctiveness, the average trait distance of a species to other species in a community offers promising insights into biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem functioning. However, the ecological mechanisms underlying the emergence and persistence of functionally distinct species are poorly unders...

Aim Understanding how combinations of ecological traits at the community‐level vary with environmental conditions is crucial to anticipate and respond to the biodiversity crisis. While this topic is popular, most attempts to analyse and predict multiple traits in space and time ignore the inherent correlations between these traits. In doing so, the...

Land use intensification favours particular trophic groups which can induce architectural changes in food-webs. These changes can deeply impact ecosystem functioning, stability and robustness to extinctions. However, the imprint of land management intensity on food-web architecture has rarely been characterised across large spatial extent and vario...

Predicting or controlling the state of an ecological community is a core global change challenge. Dynamical models provide one toolkit, but parameterizing these models can be challenging, and interpretation can be difficult. We here propose rewriting dynamical model parameters in terms of more interpretable and measurable functional traits and envi...

Current models of island biogeography treat endemic and non-endemic species as if they were functionally equivalent, focussing primarily on species richness. Thus, the functional composition of island biotas in relation to island biogeographic variables remains largely unknown. Using plant trait data (plant height, leaf area, flower length) for 895...

Beyond the local abundance of species, their functional trait distinctiveness is now recognized as a key driver of community dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Yet, since the functional distinctiveness of a species is always relative to a given species pool, a species distinct at regional scale might not necessarily be distinct at local or communi...

Although how rare species persist in communities is a major ecological question, the critical phenotypic dimension of rarity is broadly overlooked. Recent work has shown that evaluating functional distinctiveness, the average trait distance of a species to other species in a community, offers essential insights into biodiversity dynamics, ecosystem...

Taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversities are important facets of biodiversity. Studying them together has improved our understanding of community dynamics, ecosystem functioning, and conservation values.1–3 In contrast to species, traits, and phylogenies, the diversity of biotic interactions has so far been largely ignored as a biodivers...

Despite evidence of a positive effect of functional diversity on ecosystem productivity, the importance of functionally distinct species (i.e., species that display an original combination of traits) is poorly understood. To investigate how distinct species affect ecosystem productivity, we used a forest gap model to simulate realistic temperate fo...

The impact of global change on biodiversity is commonly assessed in terms of changes in species distributions, community richness and community composition. Whether and how much associations between species are also changing is much less documented. In this study, we quantify changes in large-scale patterns of species associations in bird communiti...

Species responses to climate change depend on environment, genetics, and interactions among these factors. Intraspecific cytotype (ploidy level) variation is a common type of genetic variation in many species. However, the importance of intraspecific cytotype variation in determining demography across environments is poorly known. We studied quakin...

Ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss have been caused by economic booms in developing countries over recent decades. In response, ecosystem restoration projects have been advanced in some countries but the effectiveness of different approaches and indicators at large spatio-temporal scales (i.e. whole catchments) remains poorly understood. T...

Global changes alter the dynamics of biodiversity, and are forecasted to continue or worsen in the decades to come. Modelling approaches used to anticipate these impacts are mainly based on the equivalence between spatial and temporal response to environmental forcings, generally called space‐for‐time substitution. However, several processes are kn...

Conserving functionally diverse bird communities in European farmland is becoming critical, with no exception for regions of wine production. Management intensification combined with the loss of semi‐natural habitats in wine‐growing landscapes has led to a long‐term decline not only in birds of conservation concern but also in once common insectivo...

Little is known about whether changes in lake ecosystem structure over the past 150 years are unprecedented when considering longer timescales. Similarly, research linking environmental stressors to lake ecological resilience has traditionally focused on a few sentinel sites, hindering the study of spatially synchronous changes across large areas....

Aim The impact of global change on biodiversity is commonly assessed in terms of changes in species distributions, species richness and species composition across communities. Whether and how much interactions between species are also changing is much less documented and mostly limited to local studies of ecological networks. Moreover, we largely i...

Aim The functional trait composition of plant communities is thought to be determined largely by climate, but relationships between contemporary trait distributions and climate are often weak. Spatial mismatches between trait and climatic conditions are commonly thought to arise from disequilibrium responses to past environmental changes. We aimed...

It is controversial whether communities are saturated with species, or have vacant niches. The prevalence of vacant niches and the processes likely to promote their existence are poorly known. We used a process‐based forest gap‐model to simulate plant community dynamics in 11 sites along a climatic gradient across central Europe. We then used hyper...

Rural landscapes of western Europe have considerably changed in the last decades under the combined pressure of climate and land use changes, leading to a dramatic decline of farmland biodiversity, including common farmland birds. The respective roles of climate and land use and cover changes in driving bird population trends are primarily assessed...

Community Weighted Means (CWM) are valuable tools describing community composition with respect to one given trait. They have been widely used as indicators in global change studies to measure biodiversity responses to environmental perturbations. However, how individual species contribute to such community indicators has hardly been investigated....

Robust predictions of ecosystem responses to climate change are challenging. To achieve such predictions, ecology has extensively relied on the assumption that community states and dynamics are at equilibrium with climate. However, empirical evidence from Quaternary and contemporary data suggest that species communities rarely follow equilibrium dy...

Global changes are modifying the structure of species assemblages, but the generality of resulting diversity patterns and of their drivers is poorly understood. Any such changes can be detected and explained by comparing temporal trends in taxonomic and functional diversity over broad spatial extents. In this study, we addressed three complementary...

Les changements globaux affectent la biodiversité à tous les niveaux de l’espace, du temps et d’organisation biologique. Afin de limiter notre impact sur le monde naturel, il est nécessaire de concilier nos activités avec les dynamiques de la biodiversité. Dans ce but, l’écologie scientifique a pour rôle d’apporter les connaissances scientifiques n...

The spatial tracking of climatic shifts is frequently reported as a biodiversity response to climatic change. However, species' range shifts are often idiosyncratic and inconsistent with climatic shift predictions. At the community scale, this discrepancy can be measured by comparing the spatial shift in the relative composition of cold- vs warm-ad...

Aims Climate change is known to drive both the reshuffling of whole assemblages and range shifts of individual species. Less is known about how local colonizations and extinctions of individual species contribute to changes at the community level. Our aim was to estimate the contribution of individual species to a change in community composition at...

Abstract Context In heterogeneous landscapes, habitat complementation is a key process underlying the distribution of mobile species able to exploit non-substitutable resources over large home ranges. For instance, insectivorous bats need to forage in a diversity of habitat patches offering varied compositions and structures within forest landscape...

Aim Protected areas ( PA s) are the mainstay of our conservation strategies. While they may succeed in locally preventing species and habitat degradation due to human activities, their ability to mitigate the impacts of climate change on biodiversity is still debated. We assessed whether community and species responses to climate change were relate...