Ecosystem ecology articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    It has been suggested that carbon starvation, owing to reduced availability of non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs), is an important contributor to tree mortality during drought in tropical rainforests; however, data from the world’s longest-running experimental drought study presented here show no evidence of carbon starvation, and instead the researchers conclude that impaired water hydraulic processes (involving the transport of water from soil to leaf) have a more important role in triggering tree death from long-term drought.

    • L. Rowland
    • , A. C. L. da Costa
    •  & P. Meir

  • Letter |

    Severe drought in a tropical forest ecosystem suppresses photosynthetic carbon uptake and plant maintenance respiration, but growth is maintained, suggesting that, overall, less carbon is available for tree tissue maintenance and defence, which may cause the subsequent observed increase in tree mortality.

    • Christopher E. Doughty
    • , D. B. Metcalfe
    •  & Y. Malhi

  • Letter |

    An analysis of 21 coral reefs in the Indian Ocean using data across 17 years that spanned a major climatic disturbance reveals factors that predispose a coral reef to recovery or regime shift from hard corals to macroalgae; these results could foreshadow the likely outcomes of tropical coral reefs to the effects of climate change, informing management and adaptation plans.

    • Nicholas A. J. Graham
    • , Simon Jennings
    •  & Shaun K. Wilson

  • Article |

    Net primary production is affected by temperature and precipitation, but whether this is a direct kinetic effect on plant metabolism or an indirect ecological effect mediated by changes in plant age, plant biomass or growing season length is unclear — this study develops metabolic scaling theory to be able to answer this question and applies it to a global data set of plant productivity, concluding that it is indirect effects that explain the influence of climate on productivity, which is characterized by a common scaling relationship across climate gradients.

    • Sean T. Michaletz
    • , Dongliang Cheng
    •  & Brian J. Enquist

  • Letter |

    The discrepancy between the components of the oceanic carbon budget — export of carbon from the surface and its conversion into carbon dioxide by water-column biota at depth — is reconciled using field data and a steady-state model which indicates that synergy between microbes and zooplankton is an important factor.

    • Sarah L. C. Giering
    • , Richard Sanders
    •  & Daniel J. Mayor

  • Letter |

    A global analysis shows that for most tree species the largest trees are the fastest-growing trees, a finding that resolves conflicting assumptions about tree growth and that has implications for understanding forest carbon dynamics, resource allocation trade-offs within trees and plant senescence.

    • N. L. Stephenson
    • , A. J. Das
    •  & M. A. Zavala

  • Letter |

    Ecosystem mycorrhizal type is shown to have a stronger effect on soil carbon storage than temperature, precipitation, clay content and primary production; ecosystems dominated by ectomycorrhizal and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi contain 70% more soil carbon per unit nitrogen than do ecosystems dominated by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

    • Colin Averill
    • , Benjamin L. Turner
    •  & Adrien C. Finzi

  • Letter |

    Plant invasions are thought to alter the ecosystem in a way that disadvantages the native species, making re-establishment after eradication difficult; here, on returning to a site at which an invasive plant altered nitrogen-mineralization levels several decades ago, mineralization is found to have returned to pre-invasion levels, although these new conditions favour new invaders over the natives.

    • Stephanie G. Yelenik
    •  & Carla M. D’Antonio

  • Letter |

    A modelling study of the mechanisms of extinction within ecological networks reveals how even a small reduction in the population size of a species may lead to the loss of its ecological functionality—that is, to its functional extinction—by causing extinction of other organisms in the food web, often only indirectly connected to the focal species, revealing the value of conservation strategies that target a broader ecological network.

    • Torbjörn Säterberg
    • , Stefan Sellman
    •  & Bo Ebenman

  • Letter |

    Two decades of summer warming in an Alaskan tundra ecosystem increased plant biomass and woody dominance, indirectly increased winter soil temperature, homogenized the soil trophic structure and suppressed surface-soil-decomposer activity, but did not change net soil carbon or nitrogen storage.

    • Seeta A. Sistla
    • , John C. Moore
    •  & Joshua P. Schimel

  • Letter |

    The resilience of a global sample of ecosystems to an increase in drought conditions is assessed, comparing data from the early twenty-first with the late twentieth century; results indicate a cross-ecosystem capacity for tolerating low precipitation and responding to high precipitation during recent warm drought and yet suggest a threshold to resilience with prolonged warm drought.

    • Guillermo E. Ponce-Campos
    • , M. Susan Moran
    •  & Patrick J. Starks

  • Letter |

    A comparative assessment of six alternative cropping systems over 20 years shows that, once well established, successional herbaceous vegetation grown on marginal lands has a direct greenhouse gas emissions mitigation capacity that rivals that of purpose-grown crops.

    • Ilya Gelfand
    • , Ritvik Sahajpal
    •  & G. Philip Robertson

  • Letter |

    Although loss of biodiversity is known to cause reduction in ecosystem function, it is not known how this threat compares to other environmental alterations such as climate change; this analysis of the data from over 100 published studies shows that biodiversity loss is as significant as other major drivers of change in ecosystem function.

    • David U. Hooper
    • , E. Carol Adair
    •  & Mary I. O’Connor

  • Review Article |

    Pathogenic fungi are increasingly contributing to the global emerging disease burden, threatening biodiversity and imposing increasing costs on ecosystem health, hence steps must be taken to tighten biosecurity worldwide to reduce the rate of fungal disease emergence.

    • Matthew C. Fisher
    • , Daniel. A. Henk
    •  & Sarah J. Gurr

  • Letter |

    Analysis of stability criteria for different types of complex ecological network shows key differences between predator–prey interactions, which are stabilizing, and competitive and mutualistic interactions, which are destabilizing.

    • Stefano Allesina
    •  & Si Tang

  • Comment |

    There's a solution to the continent's rampant fires and feral animals, says David Bowman — introduce large mammals and increase hunting pressure.

    • David Bowman

  • Letter |

    Decreased rates of recovery from perturbations, or critical slowing down, are demonstrated in a living system, indicating that recovery rates can be used to probe the resilience of complex systems.

    • Annelies J. Veraart
    • , Elisabeth J. Faassen
    •  & Marten Scheffer

  • Books & Arts |

    Shahid Naeem compares two books that call for us to embrace the influence of humans on ecosystems.

    • Shahid Naeem

  • News & Views |

    Ecosystems acquire nitrogen from the atmosphere, but this source can't account for the large nitrogen capital of some systems. The finding that bedrock can also act as a nitrogen source may help solve the riddle. See Letter p.78

    • Edward A. G. Schuur

  • News & Views |

    A consequence of Darwin's 'principle of divergence' is that loss of species can harm the functioning of ecosystems. A study of algal communities in artificial streams suggests that he was right. See Letter p.86

    • Andy Hector

  • News |

    Researchers' flipper bands can seriously dent penguin survival, and also skew the results of research.

    • Daniel Cressey

  • News |

    Conserving biodiversity while reducing contact with humans can limit the spread of pathogens

    • Natasha Gilbert

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