ALBERT

Description: Human alterations to nutrient cycles and herbivore communities are affecting global biodiversity dramatically. Ecological theory predicts these changes should be strongly counteractive: nutrient addition drives plant species loss through intensified competition for light, whereas herbivores prevent competitive exclusion by increasing ground-level light, particularly in productive systems. Here we use experimental data spanning a globally relevant range of conditions to test the hypothesis that herbaceous plant species losses caused by eutrophication may be offset by increased light availability due to herbivory. This experiment, replicated in 40 grasslands on 6 continents, demonstrates that nutrients and herbivores can serve as counteracting forces to control local plant diversity through light limitation, independent of site productivity, soil nitrogen, herbivore type and climate. Nutrient addition consistently reduced local diversity through light limitation, and herbivory rescued diversity at sites where it alleviated light limitation. Thus, species loss from anthropogenic eutrophication can be ameliorated in grasslands where herbivory increases ground-level light.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Borer, Elizabeth T -- Seabloom, Eric W -- Gruner, Daniel S -- Harpole, W Stanley -- Hillebrand, Helmut -- Lind, Eric M -- Adler, Peter B -- Alberti, Juan -- Anderson, T Michael -- Bakker, Jonathan D -- Biederman, Lori -- Blumenthal, Dana -- Brown, Cynthia S -- Brudvig, Lars A -- Buckley, Yvonne M -- Cadotte, Marc -- Chu, Chengjin -- Cleland, Elsa E -- Crawley, Michael J -- Daleo, Pedro -- Damschen, Ellen I -- Davies, Kendi F -- DeCrappeo, Nicole M -- Du, Guozhen -- Firn, Jennifer -- Hautier, Yann -- Heckman, Robert W -- Hector, Andy -- HilleRisLambers, Janneke -- Iribarne, Oscar -- Klein, Julia A -- Knops, Johannes M H -- La Pierre, Kimberly J -- Leakey, Andrew D B -- Li, Wei -- MacDougall, Andrew S -- McCulley, Rebecca L -- Melbourne, Brett A -- Mitchell, Charles E -- Moore, Joslin L -- Mortensen, Brent -- O'Halloran, Lydia R -- Orrock, John L -- Pascual, Jesus -- Prober, Suzanne M -- Pyke, David A -- Risch, Anita C -- Schuetz, Martin -- Smith, Melinda D -- Stevens, Carly J -- Sullivan, Lauren L -- Williams, Ryan J -- Wragg, Peter D -- Wright, Justin P -- Yang, Louie H -- England -- Nature. 2014 Apr 24;508(7497):517-20. doi: 10.1038/nature13144. Epub 2014 Mar 9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St Paul, Minnesota 55108, USA. ; Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA. ; Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA. ; Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment, Carl-von- Ossietzky University, 26382 Wilhelmshaven, Oldenburg, Germany. ; Department of Wildland Resources and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, Utah 84322, USA. ; Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras (IIMyC), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET), Mar del Plata 7600 , Argentina. ; Department of Biology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27109, USA. ; School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA. ; Agricultural Research Service (ARS), United States Department of Agriculture, Fort Collins, Colorado 80526, USA. ; Deptartment of Forest, Rangeland and Watershed Stewardship, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523, USA. ; Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA. ; 1] ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia [2] School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland. ; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Ontario M1C 1A4, Canada. ; State Key Laboratory of Grassland and Agro-Ecosystems, Research Station of Alpine Meadow and Wetland Ecosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000 Gansu, China. ; Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, California 92093, USA. ; Department of Biology, Imperial College at Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK. ; Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA. ; Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder Colorado 80309, USA. ; US Geological Survey, Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. ; Queensland University of Technology, Biogeosciences, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia. ; Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA. ; Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3RB, UK. ; School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68588, USA. ; Berkeley Initiative for Global Change Biology, University of California, Berkeley 94704, USA. ; Department of Plant Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, llinois 61820, USA. ; Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. ; Department of Plant & Soil Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40546, USA. ; Australian Research Center for Urban Ecology, c/o School of Botany, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia, and School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. ; Department of Zoology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. ; CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Wembley, West Australia 6913, Australia. ; Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf 8903, Switzerland. ; Lancaster Environment Center, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, UK. ; Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA. ; Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24670649" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉

Description: Determining how widespread human-induced changes such as habitat loss, landscape fragmentation, and climate instability affect populations, communities, and ecosystems is one of the most pressing environmental challenges. Critical to this challenge is understanding how these changes are affecting the movement abilities and dispersal trajectories of organisms and what role conservation...

Description: 〈p〉Deleterious effects of habitat fragmentation and benefits of connecting fragments could be significantly underestimated because changes in colonization and extinction rates that drive changes in biodiversity can take decades to accrue. In a large and well-replicated habitat fragmentation experiment, we find that annual colonization rates for 239 plant species in connected fragments are 5% higher and annual extinction rates 2% lower than in unconnected fragments. This has resulted in a steady, nonasymptotic increase in diversity, with nearly 14% more species in connected fragments after almost two decades. Our results show that the full biodiversity value of connectivity is much greater than previously estimated, cannot be effectively evaluated at short time scales, and can be maximized by connecting habitat sooner rather than later.〈/p〉