In the course of the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning debate, the issue of multifunctionality of species communities has recently become a major focus. Elemental stoichiometry is related to a variety of processes reflecting multiple plant responses to the biotic and abiotic environment. It can thus be expected that the diversity of a plant assemblage alters community level plant tissue chemis...

Understanding drivers of biodiversity patterns is of prime importance in this era of severe environmental crisis. More diverse plant communities have been postulated to represent a larger functional trait-space, more likely to sustain a diverse assembly of herbivore species. Here, we expand this hypothesis to integrate environmental, functional and phylogenetic variation of plant communities as...

Plant diversity and vegetation distribution in an area are related to the soil physical and chemical properties. The knowledge of relationships between species diversityand soil parameteris essential for sustainable ecosystem management. This study was conducted to investigate the relationships between soil factors and species diversity indices in the protected rangelands of Lashgardar, Malayer...

Large-scale habitat destruction and climate change result in the non-random loss of evolutionary lineages, reducing the amount of evolutionary history represented in ecological communities. Yet, we have limited understanding of the consequences of evolutionary history on the structure of food webs and the services provided by biological communities. Drawing on 11 years of data from a long-term ...

Excluding grazers is one of most efficient ways to restore degraded grasslands in desert-steppe communities, but may negatively affect the recovery of plant species diversity. However, diversity differences between grazed and fenced grasslands in desert-steppe are poorly known. In a Stipa breviflora desert steppe community in Northern China, we established six plots to examine spatial patterns ...

Lee A. Dyer* and Deborah Letourneau Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA *Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Apex predators and plant resources are both critical for maintaining diversity in biotic communities, but the indirect ( cascad...