Creating Your Own Environment: Ecosystems Sustained by Cushion Plants

Photo 1: Mountains such as the Spanish Sierra Nevada are biodiversity hotspots teeming with endemic species. At high altitude (3200 m asl), these environments sustained by cushion plants. credit: Gianalberto Losapio. 2: Ecosystem engineers Arenaria tetraquetra (left) and Hormathophylla spinosa (right) can tolerate stress, ameliorate environment facilitate other plant 3: The cushions of hosts different blooming plants Jasione amethistina, Lotus corniculatus subsp. glacialis, Galium pyrenaicum, Anthyllis vulneraria pseudoarundana, Leontodon boryi, Nevadensia purpurea. 4: flower visitor network is characterized more than 50 species insects. These include cosmopolitan honeybees (Apis mellifera), which moved at for foraging on flowers Sideritis glacialis. 5: Not all insects visiting actual pollinators, but they also predators, parasitoids, or herbivores, like weevils Otiorhynchus (Curculionidae). This way, enrich functional diversity complexity insect communities. photographs illustrate article “An experimental approach to assessing impact ecosystem functions” Losapio, Bernhard Schmid, Jordi Bascompte, Richard Michalet, Pierfilippo Cerretti, Christoph Germann, Jean-Paul Haenni, Rainer Neumeyer, Francisco Javier Ortiz-Sánchez, Adrian C. Pont, Pascal Rousse, Jürg Daniele Sommaggio, Christian Schöb in Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3243