Ecology Letters最新文献

Feeding the largest share of the global population, cereal production must enhance sustainability while ensuring food security under global change. Unfortunately, the number of sustainable practices needed to support production, ecosystem services and land conservation remains virtually unknown. We compiled a database of 1570 observations from 349 sites in 57 countries to assess how the number of sustainable practices influences multiple ecosystem services. Our findings reveal that a high number of sustainable practices is crucial for enhancing agroecosystem services such as soil carbon storage, fertility and microbial habitat while supporting yield. Sustainable practices such as crop rotation, limited tillage and incorporation of crop residues were especially important. North America, Eastern Europe and China were particularly dependent on the use of multiple sustainable practices to maintain ecosystem services. Findings underscore the need for integrative strategies employing multiple sustainable practices for mitigating global change, ensuring food security and sustaining ecosystems.

Statistical autocorrelation between sampling units violates independence assumptions in many analyses. Here, we used simulations and empirical analyses to demonstrate how shared evolutionary history between species and species overlap among communities leads to an insidious form of autocorrelation, termed compositional autocorrelation. We simulated compositionally autocorrelated ecosystem functions across communities and assessed the type I error, statistical power and accuracy of slope estimates from naïve linear regression models and mixed models accounting for compositional autocorrelation. Mixed models maintained lower type I error, similar or higher statistical power, and more accurate slope estimates compared to linear regression. Re-analysing an empirical dataset, we found linear regression underestimated uncertainty in species richness effects for eight of 10 ecosystem functions. As species overlap and shared evolutionary history are common features in community data, our results highlight the need to explicitly consider compositional autocorrelation in statistical analyses to ensure correct inferences.

Biodiversity can buffer ecosystem functioning against disturbances by allowing species to compensate for the functions lost through the extirpation of other species, a key process known as ecological insurance. Functional ecology has extended this idea by emphasising trait redundancy amongst species that help buffer core ecosystem functions. However, some functions might be supported only by species with distinct combinations of trait values, which are less likely to be redundant within local communities. Here, we present a new and widely applicable framework to quantify the spatial insurance of locally functionally distinct species amongst communities. Our framework characterises how communities can disproportionately insure (functional sources) or depend on (functional sinks) neighbour communities, a dual relationship that is not captured by traditional metrics of functional beta diversity. We illustrate the application of our framework at broad spatial scales for plants and birds, highlighting biogeographic patterns of functional sources and sinks. This trait-based spatial perspective reveals functional vulnerability, as illustrated by bird communities where functional sources were disproportionately impacted by human activities. It also provides a new approach to identify regions that differ in potential resilience to environmental change and to inform conservation strategies grounded in spatial trait distributions, supporting the preservation of functional distinctiveness beyond a focus on local biodiversity metrics.

Anticipating ecosystem responses to global change requires identifying the isolated and combined effects of environmental disturbance across both space and time. Examining the coordinated responses of ecosystems has recently emerged as a powerful approach to advance this understanding. We conducted two complementary experiments to identify whether, and if so how, warming temperatures, nutrient enrichment, predator overexploitation (i.e., reduced apex predator abundance) and their combination drive coordinated responses of freshwater ecosystems by evaluating the dynamics of synchrony between control and disturbed mesocosms using high-frequency dissolved oxygen saturation measurements, an integrative parameter of the metabolic balance of ecosystems. Nutrient enrichment desynchronized the oxygen dynamics and their component cycles between treatments, likely arising from elevated primary production. Warming and overexploitation tended to desynchronize oxygen cycles from the control, particularly at short time scales. Nutrient enrichment combined with warming dampened desynchronization between control (ambient) and treatment mesocosms, whereas desynchronization was enhanced when simultaneously subject to predator overexploitation. As one of the first experimental demonstrations of global change impacts on ecosystem synchrony, this study highlights the need—and opens new avenues—to detect alterations in ecosystem functioning across previously unexplored spatial and temporal scales.

Lalechère, E. Marrec, R. Lenoir, J. 2025 A Non-Equilibrium Species Distribution Model Reveals Unprecedented Depth of Time Lag Responses to Past Environmental Change Trajectories Ecology Letters 28(1), e70040. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70040

To map the extinction debt and the immigration credit in Figure 3B, we subtracted the effective number of species as predicted by stacking all species binary maps based on the equilibrium SDMs from that obtained by the non-equilibrium SDMs. This implies that the negative values indicate an immigration credit and the positive values indicate an extinction debt.

The revised results and discussion are:

‘We found evidence for immigration credits to be particularly pronounced in boreal forests, near the Carpathians, and north of the Black Sea while evidence for extinction debts was mostly pronounced in secondary forests in the Mediterranean part of the Alps and Pyrenees, as well as in the Caucasus and in the mountainous areas north of the Caspian sea’.

‘We have shown that European bird communities are mostly affected by an immigration credit and not so much by an extinction debt. The immigration credit is particularly pronounced in boreal forests, which is consistent with the increase in average temperature therein. Overall, the extinction debt is mostly located in Mediterranean forests, the Caucasus and the mountainous areas north of the Caspian Sea’.

We apologise for the error.