Climate change is altering disturbance regimes outside historical norms, which can impact biodiversity by selecting for plants with particular traits. The relative impact of disturbance characteristics on plant traits and community structure may be mediated by environmental gradients. We aimed to understand how wildfire impacted understory plant communities and plant […]
Terrestrial animal communities are largely shaped by vegetation and climate. With climate also shaping vegetation, can we attribute animal patterns solely to climate? Our study observes ant community changes along climatic gradients (i.e., elevational gradients) within different habitat types (i.e., open and forest) on the Colorado Plateau in the southwestern […]
Water and CO2 flux responses (e.g., evapotranspiration [ET] and net ecosystem exchange [NEE]) to environmental conditions can provide insights into how climate change will affect the terrestrial water and carbon budgets, especially in sensitive semiarid ecosystems. Here, we evaluated sensitivity of daily ET and NEE to current and antecedent (past) […]
The impacts of climate change and extreme weather events (e.g. frost-, heat-, drought-, and heavy rainfall events) on the continuous phenological development over the entire seasonal cycle remained poorly understood. Previous studies mainly focused on modeling key phenological transition dates (e.g. discrete timing of spring bud-break and fall senescence) based […]
The diversity patterns of macroorganisms (i.e., plants) among different habitats have been well documented, however, those of microorganisms (i.e., fungi) as well as the relationships between them are still unclear. Here, we tested whether and to what degree fungal diversity was related to habitat types and compared diversity patterns of […]
The challenges of restoration in dryland ecosystems are growing due to a rise in anthropogenic disturbance and increasing aridity. Plant functional traits are often used to predict plant performance and can offer a window into potential outcomes of restoration efforts across environmental gradients. We analyzed a database including 15 yr […]
Warming global temperatures are changing life on every continent on Earth, including Antarctica, where more microbes are moving in to territory previously covered by ice. How these microbes respond to warming offers us clues about what future Antarctica will look like and who will thrive there. Microbial ecologist and PhD […]
If the fate of carbon is a test that planet Earth is taking right now, one of the answer keys is likely to be found in soil, where microorganisms—which account for nearly 15 percent of global biomass, by some estimates—eat, store and respire carbon and other nutrients. As Earth warms, […]
Boreal forest fires emit large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere primarily through the combustion of soil organic matter1–3. During each fire, a portion of this soil beneath the burned layer can escape combustion, leading to a net accumulation of carbon in forests over multiple fire events4. Climate warming and […]
Shifts in the extent of the boreal forest during past warm intervals and correlations between climate and the position of the forest–tundra ecotone suggest that recent temperature increases will facilitate forest expansion into tundra ecosystems. In this study, we used a unique set of high-resolution repeat photographs to characterize white […]