Yuanyuan Huang

• Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies

Studies have investigated the interactions between plants through competition and resource sharing to understand the mechanisms behind the positive effects of plant diversity on productivity. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are important info-chemicals in plant-plant interactions, but they have so far rarely been considered in this context. Here,...

Soil microbial communities provide numerous ecosystem functions, such as nutrient cycling, decomposition, and carbon storage. However, global change, including land‐use and climate changes, affects soil microbial communities and activity. As extreme weather events (e.g., heatwaves) tend to increase in magnitude and frequency, we investigated the ef...

Global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of climate extremes. Forests may buffer climate extremes by creating their own attenuated microclimate below their canopy, which maintains forest functioning and biodiversity. However, the effect of tree diversity on temperature buffering in forests is largely unexplored. Here, we show that t...

The increasing strength of positive biodiversity effects on plant community productivity, observed in long‐term biodiversity experiments, relates to mixed responses at the species level. However, it is still not well understood if the observed mixed responses are adaptations to the different selection pressures in plant communities of different div...

Biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships (BEF) have been extensively studied, particularly within the primary layers of producers in terrestrial ecosystems. In multi-layer ecosystems such as forests, the contribution of diversity in the secondary layer, i.e. shrubs, to ecosystem functioning is still largely unknown. Here we used 11-year gro...

Anthropogenic land‐use practices influence ecosystem functions and the environment. Yet, the effect of global land‐use change on ecosystem nitrogen (N) cycling remains unquantified despite that ecosystem N cycling plays a critical role in maintaining food security. Here, we analysed 2430 paired observations globally to show that converting natural...

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)...

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...

The increasing strength of positive biodiversity effects on plant community productivity in long-term biodiversity experiments has been shown to be related to mixed responses at species level. However, it is still not well understood if the varying environments in plant communities with different diversity also exert different selection pressures t...

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...

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...

Species‐specific differences in nutrient acquisition strategies allow for complementary use of resources among plants in mixtures, which may be further shaped by mycorrhizal associations. However, empirical evidence of this potential role of mycorrhizae is scarce, particularly for tree communities. We investigated the impact of tree species richnes...

It is well known that biodiversity positively affects ecosystem functioning leading to enhanced ecosystem stability. However, this knowledge is mainly based on analyses using single ecosystem functions, while studies focusing on the stability of ecosystem multifunctionality are rare. Taking advantage of a long-term grassland biodiversity experiment...

Background Seed endophytic bacteria are beneficial to plants. They improve seedling growth by enhancing plant nutrient uptake, modulating stress-related phytohormone production, and targeting pests and pathogens with antibiotics. Seed endophyte composition can be influenced by pollination, plant cultivar, and soil physicochemical conditions. Howeve...

Plant nutrient uptake and productivity are driven by a multitude of factors that have been modified by human activities, like climate change and the activity of decomposers. However, interactive effects of climate change and key decomposer groups like earthworms have rarely been studied. In a field microcosm experiment, we investigated the effects...

Species-specific differences in nutrient acquisition strategies allow for complementary use of resources among plants in mixtures, which may be further shaped by mycorrhizal associations. However, empirical evidence of these relationships is scarce, particularly for tree communities. We investigated the impact of tree species richness and mycorrhiz...

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...

Plant nutrient uptake and productivity are driven by a multitude of factors that have been modified by human activities, such as climate change and the activity of decomposers. However, interactive effects of climate change and key decomposer groups like earthworms have rarely been studied. In a field microcosm experiment we investigated the effect...

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...

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 impacts of climate change by increasing plant productivity and ecosystem stability. Although soil temperature and its stability are key determinants of essential ecosystem processes related to water and nutrient uptake as well as soil...

Mycorrhizae are symbiotic associations between terrestrial plants and fungi in which fungi obtain nutrients in exchange for plant photosynthates. However, it remains unclear how different types of mycorrhizae affect their host interactions and productivity. Using a long-term experiment with a diversity gradient of arbuscular (AM) and ectomycorrhiza...

Tree species are known to predominantly interact either with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) or ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi. However, there is a knowledge gap regarding whether these mycorrhizae differently influence biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships and whether a combination of both can increase community productivity. In 2015, we...

Tree survival affects forest biodiversity, structure and functioning. However, little is known about feedback effects of biodiversity on survival and its dependence on functional traits and interannual climatic variability. With an individual‐based dataset from a large subtropical forest biodiversity experiment, we evaluated how species richness, f...

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...

Aim In this study, we assessed the importance of local‐ to landscape‐scale effects of land cover and land use on flying insect biomass. Location Denmark and parts of Germany. Methods We used rooftop‐mounted car nets in a citizen science project (“InsectMobile”) to allow for large‐scale geographic sampling of flying insects. Volunteers sampled ins...

Tree species are known to predominantly interact either with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) or ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi. However, there is a knowledge gap whether these mycorrhizae differently influence biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships and whether a combination of both can increase community productivity. In 2015, we establishe...

Recent studies report declines in biomass, abundance and diversity of terrestrial insect groups. While anthropogenic land use is one likely contributor to this decline, studies assessing land cover as a driver of insect dynamics are rare and mostly restricted in spatial scale and types of land cover. In this study, we used rooftop-mounted car nets...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) research has extended its scope from communities that are short-lived or reshape their structure annually to structurally complex forest ecosystems. The establishment of tree diversity experiments poses specific methodological challenges for assessing the multiple functions provided by forest ecosystems. In...

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...

Aims Although the net biodiversity effect (NE) can be statistically partitioned into complementarity and selection effects (CE and SE), there are different underlying mechanisms that can cause a certain partitioning. Our objective was to assess the role of resource partitioning and species interactions as two important mechanisms that can bring abo...

Soil respiration (Rs) is a major process controlling soil carbon loss in forest ecosystems. However, the underlying mechanisms leading to variation in Rs along forest successional gradients are not well understood. In this study, we investigated the effects of biotic and abiotic factors on Rs along a forest successional gradient in southeast China....

AimsLitterfall, as an important link between aboveground and belowground processes, plays a key role in forest ecosystems. Here, we test for effects of tree species richness on litter production and litter quality in subtropical forest. The study further encompasses a factorial gradient of secondary succession that resulted from human exploitation....

The dynamics of leaf nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) have been intensively explored in short-term experiments, but rarely at longer timescales. Here, we investigated leaf N: P stoichiometry over a 27-year interval in an Inner Mongolia grassland by comparing leaf N: P concentration of 2006 with that of 1979. Across 80 species, both leaf N and P incr...

Aims: We investigated shifts in community-weighted mean traits (CWM) of 14 leaf functional traits along a secondary successional series in an evergreen broadleaf forest in subtropical southeast China. Most of the investigated traits have been reported to affect litter decomposition in previous studies. We asked whether changes in CWMs along seconda...

An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of nutrient additions on the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) colonization in the alpine meadow at Haibei field station in China. Treatments of the experiment were control, N addition (10 gN/(m2·a)), P addition (5 gP/(m2·a)), and K addition (10 gK/(m2·a)), each with six replicates. With ink-v...

AimsClear-cutting is a common forest management practice, especially in subtropical China. However, the potential ecological consequences of clear-cutting remain unclear. In particular, the effect of clear-cutting on soil processes, such as the carbon cycle, has not been quantified in subtropical forests. Here, we investigated the response of soil...