Yuxin Chen

Xiamen University | XMU · College of the Environment & Ecology

Numerous grassland experiments have found evidence for a complementarity effect, an increase in productivity with higher plant species richness due to niche partitioning. However, empirical tests of complementarity in natural forests are rare. We conducted a spatially explicit analysis of 518 433 growth records for 274 species from a 50-ha tropical...

Why tropical forests harbour an exceptional number of species with striking differences in abundances remains an open question. We propose a theoretical framework to address this question in which rare species may have different extirpation risks depending on species ranks in tree growth and sensitivities to neighbourhood interactions. To evaluate...

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...

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...

Growing threats from extreme climatic events and biodiversity loss have raised concerns about their interactive consequences for ecosystem functioning. Evidence suggests biodiversity can buffer ecosystem functioning during such climatic events. However, whether exposure to extreme climatic events will strengthen the biodiversity-dependent buffering...

Quercus chungii, a rare and endangered endemic tree species, is found exclusively in subtropical regions of China. Understanding the population structure and temporal dynamics of Q. chungii is pivotal for effective conservation and restoration of its populations and associated ecosystems. However, large knowledge gaps remain about its population st...

Rapid biodiversity losses under global climate change threaten forest ecosystem functions. However, our understanding of the patterns and drivers of multiple ecosystem functions across biodiversity gradients remains equivocal. To address this important knowledge gap, we measured simultaneous responses of multiple ecosystem functions (nutrient cycli...

Water use efficiency (WUE) is central to the global cycles of water and carbon. However, whether increasing tree diversity in plantation can increase WUE remain poorly understood. Here, we conduct a forest biodiversity experiment with 32 tree species spread in 14 ha in subtropical China to assess the effects of neighboring tree diversity on foliar...

Introduction Understanding the environmental effects shaping plant distributions is crucial for predicting future ecosystems under climate change. The effects of different environmental factors may vary in their importance in determining plant distributions at different spatial and taxonomic scales, which affects our understanding of plant–environm...

The manner in which tree species differ in their responses to chilling rain in warm and species-rich (sub-)tropical forests is not well understood. Understanding this variation between species is essential for linking the responses of individual plants to chilling rain with ecological consequences at the forest community and ecosystem levels. We hy...

Understanding how non-trophic social systems respond to environmental gradients is still a challenge in animal ecology, particularly in comparing changes in species composition to changes in interspecific interactions. Here, we combined long-term monitoring of mixed-species bird flocks, data on participating species' evolutionary history and traits...

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...

Water use efficiency (WUE) is central to the global cycles of water and carbon. However, whether increasing tree diversity in forests can increase WUE remains poorly understood because the variation in WUE may result from multiple mechanisms acting concurrently. Disentangling their relative importance represents a major challenge. Here, we conducte...

Investigating the link among plant growth rates, traits and local environmental heterogeneity is necessary for understanding forest dynamics and community assembly. Although recent results showed that aboveground traits are key for determining organism’s performance and main resource-use strategies, it is clear that organism performance is influenc...

Rapid and large-scale biological invasion results in widespread biodiversity loss and degradation of essential ecosystem services, especially in mangrove forests. Recent evidence suggests that the establishment and dispersal of invasive species may be exacerbated in a fragmented landscape, but the influence of mangrove fragmentation on coastal biol...

Growing threats from extreme climatic events and biodiversity loss have raised concerns about their interactive consequences for ecosystem functioning. Evidence suggests that biodiversity is crucial to buffer ecosystem functioning facing climatic extremes. However, whether evolutionary processes in species mixtures underpin such biodiversity-depend...

Rapid and large-scale biological invasion results in widespread biodiversity loss and degradation of essential ecosystem services, especially in mangrove forests. Recent evidence suggests that the establishment and dispersal of invasive species may exacerbated in fragmented landscape, but the influence of mangrove fragmentation on coastal biologica...

Insect herbivory on seedling leaves is one of the most important factors driving seedling growth and mortality in natural forests, which sets the pivotal roles of insect herbivory in affecting natural forest regeneration and species composition. The intensity of herbivory can be influenced by multiple biotic and abiotic factors affecting leaf detec...

Aim How environmental factors drive plant distribution across the globe is one of the most fundamental questions in ecology. Nevertheless, the relative importance of different environmental factors in driving plant distributions across spatial scales and among plant groups is not clear. This study aims to disentangle how plant–environment relations...

Functional traits are expected to provide insights into the abiotic and biotic drivers of plant demography. However, successfully linking traits to plant demographic performance likely requires the consideration of important contextual and individual‐level information that is often ignored in trait‐based ecology. Here, we modelled 8 years of growth...

Aims The importance of density-dependent mortality in maintaining tree species diversity is widely accepted. However, density-dependent effects may vary in magnitude and direction with different abiotic conditions in forests. Theoretical predictions surmise that density-dependent effects may vary with soil available nitrogen (AN), but this still ne...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The structure of a plant community in terms of functional traits can strongly affect community productivity. Two components may contribute to this, community-wide trait means (mass-ratio hypothesis) or community-wide trait variations (diversity hypothesis) across species and individuals. We compared the explanatory power of the two hypotheses for e...

The effect of biodiversity on primary productivity has been a hot topic in ecology for over 20 years. Biodiversity-productivity relationships in natural ecosystems are highly variable, although positive relationships are most common. Understanding the conditions under which different relationships emerge is still a major challenge. Here, by analyzi...

Although direct tree demographic responses to drought are widely recognized, studies of drought‐mediated changes in tree interactions are rare. We hypothesize that drought exacerbates soil‐water limitation and intensifies competition for water, but reduces light limitation and competition for light. We predict that competition would be stronger for...

Plant traits from different organs are thought to be coordinated to achieve main vital functions. However, evidence on how the coordination of traits affect plant vital rates (e.g. mortality rates) is rare due to the poor representation of root traits, which play important roles in water and soil nutrients uptake. In this study, we collected plant...

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...

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...

Background/Question/Methods Numerous grassland experiments have found evidence for the complementarity effect -- an increase in productivity with higher plant species richness due to niche partitioning. However, empirical tests of complementarity in complex tropical forests are lacking. We conducted a spatially explicit analysis of 541,568 growth...

Background/Question/Methods The relationship between species richness and ecosystem functioning still remains challenging and controversial. The biodiversity effects undoubtedly originate from species interactions which, in turn, are positively but probably weakly correlated with species richness due to the influences of species evenness, spatial...