1. Many riparian ecosystems in Mediterranean Europe are affected by land use and flow alteration by dams. We focused on understanding how these stressors and their components affect riparian forests in the region. We asked: (i) are there well-defined, responsive riparian guilds?; (ii) do dam-induced stream flows determine abundance and distribution of riparian guilds? and (iii) what are the main drivers governing composition and cover of riparian guilds in regulated rivers? 2. We inventoried the...

Water relations in plant communities are influenced both by contrasting functional groups (grasses, shrubs) and by climate change via complex effects on interception, uptake and transpiration. We modelled the effects of functional group replacement and biomass increase, both of which can be outcomes of invasion and vegetation management, and climate change on ecological drought (soil water potential below which photosynthesis stops) in 340 semiarid grassland sites over 30-year periods. Relative to control vegetation (climate and...

1.Herbivory can drive vegetation into different states of productivity and community composition, and these changes may be stable over time due to historical contingency effects. Interactions with abiotic and biotic soil components can contribute to such long‐term legacies in plant communities through stabilizing positive feedbacks. 2.We studied the role of plant‐soil feedbacks in maintaining vegetation changes caused by historical (~1350‐1900 AD) reindeer herding in northern Sweden. These historical milking grounds (HMGs) consist of meadow plant...

Climate change projections show that temperature and precipitation increases can alter the exchange of greenhouse gases between the atmosphere and high latitude landscapes, including their freshwaters. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) plays an important role in greenhouse gas emissions, but the impact of catchment productivity on DOC release to subarctic waters remains poorly known, especially at regional scales. We test the hypothesis that increased terrestrial productivity, as indicated by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), generates...

1. Robust predictions of predator-prey interactions are fundamental for the understanding of food webs, their structure, dynamics, resistance to species loss, response to invasions and ecosystem function. Most current food web models measure parameters at the food web level to predict patterns at the same level. Thus, they are sensitive to the quality of the data, and may be ineffective in predicting non-observed interactions and disturbed food webs. There is a need for mechanistic models...

Updating of working memory has been associated with striato-frontal brain regions and phasic dopaminergic neurotransmission. We assessed raclopride binding to striatal dopamine (DA) D2 receptors during a letter-updating task and a control condition before and after 5 weeks of updating training. Results showed that updating affected DA activity before training and that training further increased striatal DA release during updating. These findings highlight the pivotal role of transient neural processes associated with D2 receptor activity...

Alpine and Arctic treeline expansion depends on establishment of tree seedlings beyond the current treeline, which is expected to occur with climate warming. However, treelines often fail to respond to higher temperatures, and it is therefore likely that other environmental factors are important for seedling establishment. We aimed to analyse our current understanding of how temperature and a range of other environmental drivers affect tree seedling establishment at the alpine and Arctic treelines worldwide, and...