20 research outputs found
Will current protected areas harbor refugia for threatened Arctic vegetation types until 2050? A first assessment
No full textArctic vegetation is crucial for fauna and the livelihoods of Northern peoples and is tightly linked to climate, permafrost soils, and water. Yet, a comprehensive understanding of climate change effects on Arctic vegetation is lacking. Protected areas cannot halt climate change but could reduce future pressure from additional drivers, like land use change and local industrial pollution. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the contribution of protected areas in safeguarding threatened Arctic vegetation types. We compare the present baseline with 2050 predictions of circumpolar Arctic vegetation type distributions and demonstrate an overrepresentation of dominant vegetation types and an underrepresentation of declining vegetation types within protected areas. Our study predicts five of eight assessed tundra vegetation types to be threatened by 2050, following International Union for Conservation of Nature criteria. Further, we mapped potential climate change refugia, areas with the highest potential for safeguarding threatened vegetation types. This study provides an essential first step assessing vegetation type vulnerability based on predictions covering 42 percent of Arctic landscapes. The co-development of new protective measures by policymakers and Indigenous peoples at a pan-Arctic scale requires more robust and spatially complete vegetation predictions, as increasing pressures from resource exploration and infrastructure development threaten the sustainable development of the rapidly thawing and greening Arctic
A comprehensive dataset on pollinator diversity, visitation rates, individual-based traits, and pollination success across four plant species in an urban garden experiment in Zurich, SwitzerlandEnviDat
No full textThis dataset presents flower visitation frequency, pollinator richness, and direct measures of pollination success for four focal plant species from a field experiment in 24 home gardens in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The home gardens were selected to vary independently in local flowering species richness and the proportion of impervious surface in a 500-m radius around the garden, a common proxy for urban intensity and associated habitat loss. We used a phytometer species approach with the following four insect-pollinated plant species: wild carrot (Daucus carota L.), radish (Raphanus sativus L.), common sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia Scop.) and common comfrey (Symphytum officinale L.).We provide the species richness and hourly visitation frequency of 167 flower visitor taxa across multiple taxonomic groups (bees, wasps, beetles, and hoverflies) from multiple sampling dates across the full flowering period of the phytometer species. We collected and identified 5,794 individuals, of which the vast majority (99.5%) were identified to the species or genus level. We provide several functional trait measurements at the individual level. For bees, we measured intertegular distance and proboscis length (the combined lengths of prementum and glossa); for the other taxa, we measured forewing length and the lengths of the labellum, prementum, and fulcrum. We additionally provide seed and/or fruit set, a direct measure of reproductive success for all phytometer plants.Further datasets for these gardens exist, linking soil and soil arthropod diversity data, bird predation data, and plant diversity and properties sampled during the same period. This dataset enables further investigations into the composition of novel anthropogenic pollinator communities, such as analyses comparing multiple cities. The fine temporal resolution of flower visitor frequency additionally provides the opportunity to conduct time series analyses of diurnal pollinator communities across environmental gradients
Blue and green food webs respond differently to elevation and land use.
No full textWhile aquatic (blue) and terrestrial (green) food webs are parts of the same landscape, it remains unclear whether they respond similarly to shared environmental gradients. We use empirical community data from hundreds of sites across Switzerland and a synthesis of interaction information in the form of a metaweb to show that inferred blue and green food webs have different structural and ecological properties along elevation and among various land-use types. Specifically, in green food webs, their modular structure increases with elevation and the overlap of consumers' diet niche decreases, while the opposite pattern is observed in blue food webs. Such differences between blue and green food webs are particularly pronounced in farmland-dominated habitats, indicating that anthropogenic habitat modification modulates the climatic effects on food webs but differently in blue versus green systems. These findings indicate general structural differences between blue and green food webs and suggest their potential divergent future alterations through land-use or climatic changes
Will current protected areas harbor refugia for threatened Arctic vegetation types until 2050? A first assessment
No full textArctic vegetation is crucial for fauna and the livelihoods of Northern peoples and is tightly linked to climate, permafrost soils, and water. Yet, a comprehensive understanding of climate change effects on Arctic vegetation is lacking. Protected areas cannot halt climate change but could reduce future pressure from additional drivers, like land use change and local industrial pollution. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the contribution of protected areas in safeguarding threatened Arctic vegetation types. We compare the present baseline with 2050 predictions of circumpolar Arctic vegetation type distributions and demonstrate an overrepresentation of dominant vegetation types and an underrepresentation of declining vegetation types within protected areas. Our study predicts five of eight assessed tundra vegetation types to be threatened by 2050, following International Union for Conservation of Nature criteria. Further, we mapped potential climate change refugia, areas with the highest potential for safeguarding threatened vegetation types. This study provides an essential first step assessing vegetation type vulnerability based on predictions covering 42 percent of Arctic landscapes. The co-development of new protective measures by policymakers and Indigenous peoples at a pan-Arctic scale requires more robust and spatially complete vegetation predictions, as increasing pressures from resource exploration and infrastructure development threaten the sustainable development of the rapidly thawing and greening Arctic.</p
Will current protected areas harbor refugia for threatened Arctic vegetation types until 2050? A first assessment
No full textR scripts to the manuscript "Deciduous tundra shrubs shift toward more acquisitive light absorption strategy under climate change treatments"
No full textThe two R-scripts were used for the statistical analysis for the manuscript entitled "Deciduous tundra shrubs shift toward more acquisitive light absorption strategy under climate change treatments"
Catchment-based sampling of river eDNA integrates terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity of alpine landscapes
No full textISSN:0029-8549ISSN:1432-1939ISSN:1432-193
Landscape diversity promotes landscape functioning in North America
No full textAbstract Biodiversity–ecosystem functioning experiments have established generally positive species richness-productivity relationships in plots of single ecosystem types, typically grassland or forest. However, it remains unclear whether these findings apply in real-world landscapes that resemble a heterogeneous mosaic of different ecosystem and plant types that interact through biotic and abiotic processes. Here, we show that landscape-level diversity, measured as number of land-cover types (different ecosystems) per 250×250 m, is positively related to landscape-wide remotely-sensed primary production across all of North America, covering 16 of 18 ecoregions of Earth. At higher landscape diversity, productivity was temporally more stable, and 20-year greening trends were accelerated. These effects occurred independent of local species diversity, suggesting emergent mechanisms at hitherto neglected levels of biological organization. Specifically, mechanisms related to interactions among land-cover types unfold at the scale of entire landscapes, similar to, but not necessarily resulting from, interactions between species within single ecosystems
Catchment-based sampling of river eDNA integrates terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity of alpine landscapes
No full textMonitoring of terrestrial and aquatic species assemblages at large spatial scales based on environmental DNA (eDNA) has the potential to enable evidence-based environmental policymaking. The spatial coverage of eDNA-based studies varies substantially, and the ability of eDNA metabarcoding to capture regional biodiversity remains to be assessed; thus, questions about best practices in the sampling design of entire landscapes remain open. We tested the extent to which eDNA sampling can capture the diversity of a region with highly heterogeneous habitat patches across a wide elevation gradient for five days through multiple hydrological catchments of the Swiss Alps. Using peristaltic pumps, we filtered 60 L of water at five sites per catchment for a total volume of 1800 L. Using an eDNA metabarcoding approach focusing on vertebrates and plants, we detected 86 vertebrate taxa spanning 41 families and 263 plant taxa spanning 79 families across ten catchments. For mammals, fishes, amphibians and plants, the detected taxa covered some of the most common species in the region according to long-term records while including a few more rare taxa. We found marked turnover among samples from distinct elevational classes indicating that the biological signal in alpine rivers remains relatively localised and is not aggregated downstream. Accordingly, species compositions differed between catchments and correlated with catchment-level forest and grassland cover. Biomonitoring schemes based on capturing eDNA across rivers within biologically integrated catchments may pave the way toward a spatially comprehensive estimation of biodiversity
