1.Tropical conservation strategies traditionally focus on large tracts of pristine forests, but given rapid primary forest decline, understanding the role of secondary forest remnants for biodiversity maintenance is critical. Until now, the interactive effects of changes in forest amount, configuration and disturbance history (secondary vs. primary forest) on the conservation value of tropical landscapes has remained unknown, hampering the incorporation of these global change drivers into local and global conservation planning. 2.We disentangled effects of...

Urbanization affects pollinator diversity and plant-pollinator networks by changing resource availability locally and in the surrounding landscape. We experimentally established (N = 12) standardized plant communities in farmland, villages and cities to identify the relative role of local and landscape effects on plant-pollinator communities along this urbanization gradient. We found that the number of flower visits by solitary bees, but not bumblebees, were highest in cities and lowest in farmland, with villages being intermediate, whereas...

Imaging techniques are a cornerstone of contemporary biology. Over the last decades, advances in micro-scale imaging techniques have allowed fascinating new insights into cell and tissue morphology and internal anatomy of organisms across kingdoms. However, most studies so far provided snapshots of given reference taxa, describing organs and tissues under “idealized” conditions. Surprisingly, there is an almost complete lack of studies investigating how an organism´s internal morphology changes in response to environmental drivers. Consequently, ecology...

Predictions of species richness by island area are a classical cornerstone in ecology, while the specific features of barrier islands have been little appreciated. Many shorelines are occupied by barrier islands, which are shaped by offshore sedimentation processes and annual storm tide events. Hence, the appearance of these islands may vary between years if they are not protected by dykes. Here, we analyzed more than 2,990 species across 36 taxonomic groups (including vertebrates, invertebrates and...

1. Climate change alters precipitation regimes worldwide and is regarded as a major threat for pollinators and pollination services. Yet, not much is known on how wetter as well as drier conditions affect food resources for pollinators and pollinator attraction in a multi-species community context. It is unclear how community shifts under changed hydrological conditions might affect pollinators. 2. This mesocosm study addresses existing research gaps by investigating effects of drought, wetness and temporary flooding...

Plant belowground organs perform essential functions, including water and nutrient uptake, anchorage, vegetative reproduction and recruitment of mutualistic soil microbiota. Recently, multivariate analyses showed that root traits of species can largely be linked to a ‘conservation’ and a ‘collaboration’ gradient. Here, we tested whether this species-level bidimensional belowground trait space also exists at the community level in grasslands. Furthermore, we tested whether the position of grassland communities in belowground trait space relates to environmental variables....