biodiversity

Biodiversity change is uncoupled from species richness trends: Consequences for conservation and monitoring

1. Global concern about human impact on biological diversity has triggered an intense research agenda on drivers and consequences of biodiversity change in parallel with international policy seeking to conserve biodiversity and associated ecosystem …

Global rise in emerging alien species results from increased accessibility of new source pools

Our ability to predict the identity of future invasive alien species is largely based upon knowledge of prior invasion history. Emerging alien species—those never before encountered as aliens—therefore pose a significant challenge to biosecurity interventions worldwide. Using a global database of the first regional records of alien species covering the years 1500–2005 we detected a surprisingly high proportion of species in recent records that have never been recorded as alien before. The high proportion of these emerging alien species mainly resulted from the increased accessibility of new source species pools in the native range. Risk assessment approaches that rely less on invasion history will need to be prioritized.

Robustness of metacommunities with omnivory to habitat destruction: disentangling patch fragmentation from patch loss

Habitat destruction, characterized by patch loss and fragmentation, is a major driving force of species extinction, and understanding its mechanisms has become a central issue in biodiversity conservation. Numerous studies have explored the effect of …

Food web persistence in fragmented landscapes

Habitat destruction, characterized by patch loss and fragmentation, is a key driver of biodiversity loss. There has been some progress in the theory of spatial food webs; however, to date, practically nothing is known about how patch configurational …

Diverse responses of species to landscape fragmentation in a simple food chain

Habitat destruction, characterized by habitat loss and fragmentation, is a key driver of species extinction in spatial extended communities. Recently, there has been some progress in the theory of spatial food webs, however to date practically little …

Functional molecular diversity of marine dissolved organic matter is reduced during degradation

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is a highly diverse mixture of compounds, accounting for one of the world's largest active carbon pools. The surprising recalcitrance of some DOM compounds to bacterial degradation has recently been associated with its …

No saturation in the accumulation of alien species worldwide

Although research on human-mediated exchanges of species has substantially intensified during the last centuries, we know surprisingly little about temporal dynamics of alien species accumulations across regions and taxa. Using a novel database of …

Unifying ecological stoichiometry and metabolic theory to predict production and trophic transfer in a marine planktonic food web

Two ecological frameworks have been used to explain multitrophic interactions, but rarely in combination: (i) ecological stoichiometry (ES), explaining consumption rates in response to consumers' demand and prey's nutrient content; and (ii) metabolic …

Environmental and trait variability constrain community structure and the biodiversity‐productivity relationship

There is still considerable debate about which mechanisms drive the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF). Although most scientists agree on the existence of two underlying mechanisms, complementarity and selection, …

Predicting the spread of marine species introduced by global shipping

Predicting the arrival of alien species remains a big challenge, which is assumed to be a consequence of the complexity of the invasion process. Here, we demonstrate that spreading of alien marine species can be predicted by a simple model using only global shipping intensities, environmental variables, and species occurrence data. We provide species lists of the next potentially invading species in a local habitat or species causing harmful algal blooms with their associated probability of invasion. This will help to improve mitigation strategies to reduce the further introduction of alien species. Although this study focuses on marine algae, the model approach can be easily adopted to other taxonomic groups and their respective drivers of invasion