Tamara Münkemüller

• PhD Biology, PhD Psychologie
• Researcher at French National Centre for Scientific Research

Mountains are particularly vulnerable to climate change, as they are warming at a rate that exceeds the global average, significantly impacting cold‐adapted ecosystems. In these environments, soil organic matter (SOM) stocks are often considerably larger than at lower elevations. These stocks are therefore highly susceptible to global warming and t...

Global warming is changing plant communities due to the arrival of new species from warmer regions and declining abundance of cold‐adapted species. However, experimentally testing predictions about trajectories and rates of community change is challenging because we normally lack an expectation for future community composition, and most warming exp...

Comprehensive assessments of functional diversity are needed to understand ecosystem alterations under global changes. The “Fun-eDNA” approach characterises functional diversity by assigning traits to taxonomic units obtained through environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling. By simultaneously analysing an unprecedented number of taxa over broad spatial sc...

Arthropods play a vital role in ecosystems; yet, their distributions remain poorly understood, particularly in mountainous regions. This study delves into the modelling of the distribution of 31 foliar arthropod genera in the French Alps, using a comprehensive approach encompassing multi‐trophic sampling, community DNA metabarcoding and random fore...

In our changing world, understanding plant community responses to global change drivers is critical for predicting future ecosystem composition and function. Plant functional traits promise to be a key predictive tool for many ecosystems, including grasslands; however, their use requires both complete plant community and functional trait data. Yet,...

Intransitive competition has received much attention over the past decade. Indeed, these cyclic arrangements of species interactions have the potential to promote and stabilize species coexistence. However, the importance of intransitive interactions in real-world species-rich communities containing a mixture of hierarchic and intransitive interact...

Soil trophic networks are key to biogeochemical cycles, in particular decomposition. However, few studies have yet quantified how microbial decomposition activity along environmental gradients is jointly driven by bacteria, fungi, and their respective consumers. Here, we quantified these direct and indirect effects on decomposition and contrasted t...

Our knowledge of the factors influencing the distribution of soil organisms is limited to specific taxonomic groups. Consequently, our understanding of the drivers shaping the entire soil multitrophic network is constrained. To address this gap, we conducted an extensive soil biodiversity monitoring program in the French Alps, using environmental D...

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...

Our knowledge of the factors influencing the distribution of soil organisms is limited to specific taxonomic groups. Consequently, our understanding of the drivers shaping the entire soil food web is constrained. To address this gap, we conducted an extensive soil biodiversity monitoring program in the French Alps, using environmental DNA to obtain...

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...

The re‐assembly of plant communities during climate warming depends on several concurrent processes. Here, we present a novel framework that integrates spatially explicit sampling, plant trait information and a warming experiment to quantify shifts in these assembly processes. By accounting for spatial distance between individuals, our framework al...

Mountain grasslands contain large stocks of soil organic carbon (SOC), of which a good part is in labile particulate form. This labile SOC may be protected by cold climate that limits microbial activity. Strong climate change in mountain regions threatens to destabilize these SOC stocks. However, so far the climate response of SOC stocks in mountai...

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...

Soil trophic networks are key to biogeochemical cycles, in particular decomposition. However, few studies have yet quantified how microbial decomposition activity along environmental gradients is jointly driven by bacteria, fungi, and their respective consumers. Here, we quantified these direct and indirect effects on decomposition and contrasted t...

Climate warming is releasing carbon from soils around the world ¹⁻³ , constituting a positive climate feedback. Warming is also causing species to expand their ranges into new ecosystems ⁴⁻⁹ . Yet, in most ecosystems, whether range expanding species will amplify or buffer expected soil carbon loss is unknown ¹⁰ . Here we used two whole-community tr...

Aim Although soil biodiversity is extremely rich and spatially variable, both in terms of species and trophic groups, we still know little about its main drivers. Here, we contrast four long‐standing hypotheses to explain the spatial variation of soil multi‐trophic diversity: energy, physiological tolerance, habitat heterogeneity and resource heter...

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...

Outside controlled experimental plots, the impact of community attributes on primary productivity has rarely been compared to that of individual species. Here, we identified plant species of high importance for productivity (key species) in >29,000 diverse grassland communities in the European Alps, and compared their effects with those of communit...

Plant–soil interactions can be major driving forces of community responses to environmental changes in terrestrial ecosystems. These interactions can leave signals in aboveground plant functional traits and belowground microbial activities and these signals can manifest in observed covariations. However, we know little about how these plant–soil li...

In the current biodiversity crisis, one of the crucial questions is how quickly plant communities can acclimate to climate warming and longer growing seasons to buffer the impairment of community functioning. Answering this question is pivotal especially for mountain grasslands that experience harsh conditions but provide essential ecosystem servic...

The increasing severity and frequency of natural disturbances requires a better understanding of their effects on all compartments of biodiversity. In Northern Fennoscandia, recent large-scale moth outbreaks have led to an abrupt change in plant communities from birch forests dominated by dwarf shrubs to grass-dominated systems. However, the indire...

Climate warming is releasing carbon from soils around the world 1–3 , constituting a positive climate feedback. Warming is also causing species to expand their ranges into new ecosystems 4–9 . Yet, in most ecosystems, whether range expanding species will amplify or buffer expected soil carbon loss is unknown ¹⁰ . Here we used alpine grasslands as a...

While the impact of biodiversity, notably functional diversity, on ecosystem productivity has been extensively studied, little is known about the effect of individual species. Here, we identified species of high importance for productivity (key species) in over 28,000 diverse grassland communities in the European Alps, and compared their effects wi...

Explaining and modeling species communities is more than ever a central goal of ecology. Recently, joint species distribution models (JSDMs), which extend species distribution models (SDMs) by considering correlations among species, have been proposed to improve species community analyses and rare species predictions while potentially inferring spe...

The increasing severity and frequency of natural disturbances requires a better understanding of their effects on all compartments of biodiversity. In Northern Fennoscandia, recent large-scale moth outbreaks have led to an abrupt change in plant communities from birch forests dominated by dwarf shrubs to grass-dominated systems. However, the indire...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is becoming a key tool for biodiversity monitoring over large geographical or taxonomic scales and for elusive taxa such as soil organisms. Increasing sample sizes and interest in remote or extreme areas often require the preservation of soil samples and thus deviations from optimal standardized protocols. How...

While soil ecosystems undergo important modifications due to global change, the effect of soil properties on plant distributions is still poorly understood. Plant growth is not only controlled by soil physico‐chemistry but also by microbial activities through the decomposition of organic matter and the recycling of nutrients essential for plants. A...

Aim More than ever, ecologists seek to understand how species are distributed and have assembled into communities using the “filtering framework”. This framework is based on the hypothesis that local assemblages result from a series of abiotic and biotic filters applied to regional species pools and that these filters leave predictable signals in o...

Understanding the processes that drive the dramatic changes in biodiversity along the productivity gradient remains a major challenge. Insight from simple, bivariate relationships so far has been limited. We combined >11,000 community plots in the French Alps with a molecular phylogeny and trait information for >1200 plant species to simultaneously...

Soil microbial communities play a key role in ecosystem functioning but still little is known about the processes that determine their turnover (β‐diversity) along ecological gradients. Here, we characterize soil microbial β‐diversity at two spatial scales and at multiple phylogenetic grains to ask how archaeal, bacterial and fungal communities are...

Aim Environmental DNA (eDNA) is increasingly used for analysing and modelling all‐inclusive biodiversity patterns. However, the reliability of eDNA‐based diversity estimates is commonly compromised by arbitrary decisions for curating the data from molecular artefacts. Here, we test the sensitivity of common ecological analyses to these curation ste...

Much effort has been devoted to better understanding the effects of environment and biodiversity on ecosystem functioning. However, few studies have moved beyond measuring biodiversity as species richness of a single group and/or focusing on a single ecosystem function. While there is a growing recognition that along environmental gradients, the co...

Issue Approaches to predicting species assemblages through stacking individual niche‐based species distribution models (S‐SDMs) need to account for community processes other than abiotic filtering. Such constraints have been introduced by implementing ecological assembly rules (EARs) into S‐SDMs, and can be based on patterns of functional traits in...

Aim The positive effect of primary productivity on animal species richness is one of the most conspicuous ecological features on Earth. However, less is known about the relationship between ecosystems primary productivity and the evolutionary history of biota. Here, we analyse how global primary productivity relates to the phylogenetic structure of...

Climate warming is supposed to enlarge the area climatically suitable to the naturalization of alien garden plants in temperate regions. However, the effects of a changing climate on the spread of naturalized ornamentals have not been evaluated by spatially and temporarily explicit range modelling at larger scales so far. Here, we assess how climat...

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is one of the most widely studied patterns in ecology, yet no consensus has been reached about its underlying causes. We argue that the reasons for this are the verbal nature of existing hypotheses, the failure to mechanistically link interacting ecological and evolutionary processes to the LDG, and the fact...

Plant communities in forest-grassland ecotones of the European Alps are already suffering from gradual climate change and will likely be exposed to more frequent and intense drought periods in the future. Yet, how gradual climate change and extreme drought will affect the stability of these plant communities is largely unknown. Here, we investigate...

Supplementary figures. (DOCX)

The FATE-HD simulation platform and drought simulation experiment. (DOCX)

Applying the hypervolumes framework and statistical results. (DOCX)

Supplementary tables. (DOCX)

Most naturalised and invasive alien plant species were originally introduced to regions for horticultural purposes. However, many regions now face an invasion debt from ornamental alien species, which have not yet naturalised. In this regard, climate change represents a threat as it may lower the barriers to naturalisation for some ornamental alien...

Functional trait composition is increasingly recognized as key to better understand and predict community responses to environmental gradients. Predictive approaches traditionally model the weighted mean trait values of communities (CWMs) as a function of environmental gradients. However, most approaches treat traits as independent regardless of kn...

Biotic resistance represents an important natural barrier to potential invaders throughout the world, yet the underlying mechanisms that drive such resistance are still debated. In theory, native communities should repel both functionally similar invaders which compete for the same resources, and invaders which possess less competitive traits. Howe...

Over the current century, alpine meadow communities will almost certainly be dominated by the transient dynamics of ecological systems attracted to an equilibrium that is itself in flux The nature of these transient dynamics and how long they will persist represents a major unknown in our understanding of how communities will respond to CC

Background and aimsSoil stability is a key ecosystem function provided by agricultural landscapes. A multitude of influential factors such as soil texture and plant community structure have been suggested, but few studies compare the relative importance of these factors for soil stability in the field. In addition, studies on effects of plant trait...

Assembly of grassland communities has long been scrutinized through the lens of functional diversity. Studies generally point to an overwhelming influence of climate on observed patterns of functional diversity, despite experimental evidence demonstrating the importance of biotic interactions. We postulate that this is because most observational st...

Climate change and extreme events, such as drought, threaten ecosystems world‐wide and in particular mountain ecosystems, where species often live at their environmental tolerance limits. In the European Alps, plant communities are also influenced by land‐use abandonment leading to woody encroachment of subalpine and alpine grasslands. In this stud...

Although our knowledge on the stabilising role of biodiversity and on how it is affected by perturbations has greatly improved, we still lack a comprehensive view on ecosystem stability that is transversal to different habitats and perturbations. Hence, we propose a framework that takes advantage of the multiplicity of components of an ecosystem an...

Whether the success of alien species can be explained by their functional or phylogenetic characteristics remains unresolved because of data limitations, scale issues and weak quantifications of success. Using permanent grasslands across France (50 000 vegetation plots, 2000 species, 130 aliens) and building on the Rabinowitz's classification to qu...

Increasing biodiversity loss due to climate change is one of the most vital challenges of the 21(st) century. To anticipate and mitigate biodiversity loss, models are needed that reliably project species' range dynamics and extinction risks. Recently, several new approaches to model range dynamics have been developed to supplement correlative speci...

During the last decades, describing, analysing and understanding the phylogenetic structure of species assemblages has been a central theme in both community ecology and macro-ecology. Among the wide variety of phylogenetic structure metrics, three have been predominant in the literature: Faith's phylogenetic diversity (PDFaith), which represents t...

The extent that biotic interactions and dispersal influence species ranges and diversity patterns across scales remains an open question. Answering this question requires framing an analysis on the frontier between species distribution modelling (SDM), which ignores biotic interactions and dispersal limitation, and community ecology, which provides...

Different assembly processes drive the spatial structure of meta-communities (β- diversity). Recently, functional and phylogenetic diversities have been suggested as indicators of these assembly processes. Assuming that diversity is a good proxy for niche overlap, high β-diversity along environmental gradients should be the result of environmental...

1. The prevalence of phylogenetic niche conservatism (PNC) in nature is still a conflicting issue. Disagreement arises from confusion over its precise definition and the variety of approaches to measure its prevalence. Recent work highlighted that common measures of PNC strongly depend on the assumptions of the underlying model of niche evolution....

What is the relative importance of environmental filtering and competition in community assembly and invasion? At large spatial scales and for species‐rich systems, this question can be answered by studying functional and phylogenetic diversity patterns. The greater availability of community composition surveys, functional trait data bases and/or p...

Ongoing and predicted global change makes understanding and predicting species’ range shifts an urgent scientific priority. Here, we provide a synthetic perspective on the so far poorly understood effects of interspecific interactions on range expansion rates. We present theoretical foundations for how interspecific interactions may modulate range...

Hutchinson defined species' realized niche as the set of environmental conditions in which populations can persist in the presence of competitors. In terms of demography, the realized niche corresponds to the environments where the intrinsic growth rate ( r ) of populations is positive. Observed species occurrences should reflect the realized niche...

The α‐, β‐, γ‐diversity decomposition methodology is commonly used to investigate changes in diversity over space or time but rarely conjointly. However, with the ever‐increasing availability of large‐scale biodiversity monitoring data, there is a need for a sound methodology capable of simultaneously accounting for spatial and temporal changes in...

If two species exhibit different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies the resource dynamics such that this favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. This coexistence mechanism, known as relative nonlinearity of competition, is well understood theoretically, but less is known about its evolutionary prop...

In 1859, Darwin had already identified environmental constraints and competition with the native community as major drivers of invasion success. Since then, a toolbox of indices and statistical approaches has been developed and commonly applied to test for the relative importance of these drivers. This toolbox is largely based on community ecology...

Aim Phylogenetic diversity patterns are increasingly being used to better understand the role of ecological and evolutionary processes in community assembly. Here, we quantify how these patterns are influenced by scale choices in terms of spatial and environmental extent and organismic scales. LocationEuropean Alps. Methods We applied 42 sampling...

Species–area (SAR) and endemics–area (EAR) relationships are amongst the most common methods used to forecast species loss resulting from habitat loss. One critical, albeit often ignored, limitation of these area-based estimates is their disregard of the ecological context that shapes species distributions. In this study, we estimate species loss u...

Empirical data on the signals and processes that direct animal movement during dispersal in heterogeneous landscapes are scarce. Our understanding could benefit from utilising simulation approaches and searching for simple rules across species and landscapes. This study sought to identify general movement behaviours that optimise butterfly movement...

Traditional null models used to reveal assembly processes from functional diversity patterns are not tailored for comparing different spatial and evolutionary scales. In this study, we present and explore a family of null models that can help disentangling assembly processes at their appropriate scales and thereby elucidate the ecological drivers o...

If two species show different nonlinear responses to a single shared resource, and if each species modifies resource dynamics such that it favors its competitor, they may stably coexist. While the mechanism behind this phenomenon, known as relative nonlinearity of competition, is well understood, less is known about its evolutionary properties and...

Darwin proposed two seemingly contradictory hypotheses for a better understanding of biological invasions. Strong relatedness of invaders to native communities as an indication of niche overlap could promote naturalization because of appropriate niche adaptation, but could also hamper naturalization because of negative interactions with native spec...

The demand for projections of the future distribution of biodiversity has triggered an upsurge in modelling at the crossroads between ecology and evolution. Despite the enthusiasm around these so-called biodiversity models, most approaches are still criticised for not integrating key processes known to shape species ranges and community structure....

Collinearity refers to the non independence of predictor variables, usually in a regression-type analysis. It is a common feature of any descriptive ecological data set and can be a problem for parameter estimation because it inflates the variance of regression parameters and hence potentially leads to the wrong identification of relevant predictor...

Functional trait differences among species are increasingly used to infer the effects of biotic and abiotic processes on species coexistence. Commonly, the trait diversity observed within communities is compared to patterns simulated in randomly generated communities based on sampling within a region. The resulting patterns of trait convergence and...

Functional trait differences among species are increasingly used to infer the effects of biotic and abiotic processes on species coexistence. Commonly, the trait diversity observed within communities is compared to patterns simulated in randomly generated communities based on sampling within a region. The resulting patterns of trait convergence and...

1. Phylogenetic signal is the tendency of related species to resemble each other more than species drawn at random from the same tree. This pattern is of considerable interest in a range of ecological and evolutionary research areas, and various indices have been proposed for quantifying it. Unfortunately, these indices often lead to contrasting re...

Ecological theory suggests that spatial distribution of biodiversity is strongly driven by community assembly processes. Thus the study of diversity patterns combined with null model testing has become increasingly common to infer assembly processes from observed distributions of diversity indices. However, results in both empirical and simulation...

Ecophylogenetics can be viewed as an emerging fusion of ecology, biogeography and macroevolution. This new and fast-growing field is promoting the incorporation of evolution and historical contingencies into the ecological research agenda through the widespread use of phylogenetic data. Including phylogeny into ecological thinking represents an opp...

There is an increasing recognition that the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes shapes the genetic footprint of populations during and after range expansions. However, more complex ecological processes regularly considered within spatial ecology remain unexplored in models describing the population genetics of range expansion. I...

When investigating complex ecological dynamics at the population or community level, we necessarily need to abstract and aggregate ecological information. The way in which information is aggregated may be crucial for the outcome of the study. In this paper, we suggest that in addition to the traditional spatial, temporal and organizational levels,...

A growing body of empirical evidence demonstrates that at an expanding front, there can be strong selection for greater dispersal propensity, whereas recent theory indicates that mutations occurring towards the front of a spatially expanding population can sometimes 'surf' to high frequency and spatial extent. Here, we consider the potential interp...

Aim The study of biological invasions has long considered species invasiveness and community invasibility as separate questions. Only recently, there is an increasing recognition that integrating these two questions offers new insights into the mechanisms of biological invasions. This recognition has renewed the interest in two long-standing and se...