Biology subjects

Boch, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Boch, S..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Rewilding beyond the wilderness: Beavers can restore stream biodiversity from urban to agricultural to natural landscapes

1 Beavers have been promoted as a cost-effective nature-based solution to restore degraded stream ecosystems and enhance overall biodiversity. However, the extent to which beaver-engineering boosts biodiversity in human-impacted landscapes remains poorly understood. 2 We assessed the responses of aquatic and terrestrial taxa (amphibians, dragonflies, fish, macrophytes, plankton, terrestrial vegetation, bats, aquatic, flying and terrestrial invertebrates) to beaver-engineering along a gradient of human land-use intensity in Switzerland. In 16 streams, we measured species richness, abundance, unique species richness, evenness, beta and gamma diversity in a beaver-engineered site with beaver dams and a control site without beaver activity. 3 Especially aquatic and semi-aquatic species profited from beaver-engineering. In response to beaver-engineering, amphibians, dragonflies, macrophytes, and plankton increased in species richness, abundance and unique species richness, while fish and terrestrial plants increased in species richness and unique species richness. Bats only increased in unique species richness, while for the other terrestrial taxa, we found no difference between beaver-engineered and control sites. Community evenness remained largely unaffected across all groups. 4 Overall, beaver-engineering increased biodiversity across a land-use gradient. For macrophytes and amphibians (species richness, unique species richness and abundance), as well for dragonflies (species richness and unique species richness), increases were smaller under higher land-use intensity. For the remaining taxa and metrics, we found no relationship between land-use intensity and responses to beaver engineering. 5 However, for beta-diversity, we found that sites with a high land-use intensity had a lower component of nestedness and stronger community turnover in comparison to more natural sites, with a significant effect for macrophytes. Gamma species richness was generally unaffected by land- use intensity, except for amphibians, which were often only found in beaver-engineered sites in high- land-use intensity areas. 6 Synthesis and applications. Our findings demonstrate that beaver-engineering significantly enhances local biodiversity across aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, even at sites with high land-use intensity. Hence, beavers can effectively restore stream biodiversity from urban to agricultural to natural landscapes. Integrating beaver-engineering into river restoration strategies can substantially advance biodiversity goals under frameworks such as the EU Water Framework Directive and national conservation policies.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Accounting for spatial interactions in the upscaling of ecosystem services

O_LIMaps of ecosystem service (ES) supply are frequently used to guide spatial planning, policy making, and ecosystem management. However, these are typically based upon coarse land-cover proxies. This approach lacks a strong mechanistic basis, and neglects spatial biodiversity dynamics and interactions among landscape properties that can modify ES provision. C_LIO_LIWe present an analytical framework for ES upscaling that incorporates spatial interactions between landscape properties to determine ES supply. The resulting models can be viewed as a spatially informed ES production function. The approach comprises seven steps that include several elements absent from most existing approaches, notably a procedure for identifying geodata variables that represent the true mechanistic drivers, the inclusion of spatial interactions in the upscaling model, and modification following expert feedback on the selected model. C_LIO_LIWe demonstrate the approach using two example ES from German grasslands: biodiversity conservation and water supply. We show that the inclusion of spatial interactions in the upscaling model improved model predictions from 15% to 33% depending on the ES evaluated. In addition, inclusion of spatial interactions led to reduced error associated with the upscaled estimates. C_LIO_LIBy overcoming several shortcomings of existing, upscaling approaches we generate resulting maps of ES supply that can more reliably inform spatial planning Further, the underlying models allow for simulation of changes in the drivers of ES supply and estimation of respective outcomes. These advantages have the potential to better link detailed local-scale ecological understanding and land management with large-scale ES supply mapping, and thus better inform decision making and spatial planning. C_LI

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Land-use impacts on plant functional diversity throughout Europe

AimGlobal biodiversity loss resulting from anthropogenic land-use activities is a pressing concern, requiring precise assessments of impacts at large spatial extents. Existing models mainly focus on species richness and abundance, lacking insights into ecological mechanisms and species roles in ecosystem functioning. To bridge this gap, we conducted an extensive analysis of the impact of human land use on vascular plant functional diversity, across diverse land-use classes and bioregions in Europe, comparing it to traditional metrics. Location: Europe Time period: 1992-2019 Major taxa studied: Vascular plants MethodsIntegrating extensive databases of vegetation plots with spatial data on land use and land cover, we paired plots from areas actively used and modified by humans with plots from natural habitats under similar environmental conditions. Using species occurrences and traits, in each plot we computed three complementary functional diversity metrics (functional richness, evenness, and divergence), species richness and abundance. We assessed the impact of land use by comparing the metrics in the paired plots. ResultsOur findings revealed that, compared to natural habitats, anthropogenic land use exhibits lower functional richness and divergence but higher functional evenness across most land-use classes and bioregions. The response of functional richness was more marked than the other two metrics and especially pronounced in croplands and urban areas and in northern bioregions. Functional richness exhibited a pattern that did not fully overlap with the trend in species richness, providing useful complementary information. Main conclusionsWe provide a large-scale precise assessment of anthropogenic land-use impacts on functional diversity across Europe. Our findings indicate that: (i) human disturbance significantly alters plant functional diversity compared to natural habitats; (ii) this alteration goes in the direction of functional homogenization; (i) functional diversity metrics complement traditional metrics by offering deeper insights into the ecological mechanisms in response to anthropogenic land use.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

One to rule them all? Assessing the performance of Forest Europe's biodiversity indicators against multitaxonomic data

Several regional initiatives and reporting efforts assess the state of forest biodiversity through broad-scale indicators based on data from national forest inventories. Although valuable, these indicators are essentially indirect and evaluate habitat quantity and quality rather than biodiversity per se. Therefore, their link to biodiversity may be weak, which decreases their usefulness for decision-making. For several decades, Forest Europe indicators assessed the state of European forests, in particular their biodiversity. However, no extensive study has been conducted to date to assess their performance - i.e. the capacity of the indicators to reflect variations in biodiversity - against multitaxonomic data. We hypothesized that no single biodiversity indicator from Forest Europe can represent overall forest biodiversity, but that several indicators would reflect habitat quality for at least some taxa in a comprehensive way. We tested the set of Forest Europes indicators against the species richness of six taxonomic and functional groups across several hundreds of sampling units over Europe. We showed that, while some indicators perform relatively well across groups (e.g. deadwood volume), no single indicator represented all biodiversity at once, and that a combination of several indicators performed better. Forest Europe indicators were chosen for their availability and ease of understanding for most people. However, we showed that gaps in the monitoring framework persist, and that surveying certain taxa along with stand structure is necessary to support policymaking and tackle forest biodiversity loss at the large scale. Adding context (e.g. forest type) may also contribute to increase the performance of biodiversity indicators. Impact statementBiodiversity indicators used to assess the state of Europes forests perform unequally; a combination of indicators is more informative

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

A fast-slow trait continuum at the level of entire communities

Across the tree of life, organismal functional strategies form a continuum from slow-to fast-growing organisms, in response to common drivers such as resource availability and disturbance. However, the synchronization of these strategies at the entire community level is untested. We combine trait data for >2800 above-and belowground taxa from 14 trophic guilds spanning a disturbance and resource availability gradient in German grasslands. Most guilds consistently respond to these drivers through both direct and trophically-mediated effects, resulting in a slow-fast axis at the level of the entire community. Fast trait communities were also associated with faster rates of whole ecosystem functioning. These findings demonstrate that slow and fast strategies can be manifested at the level of whole ecosystems, opening new avenues of ecosystem-level functional classification.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

The results of biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments are realistic

A large body of research shows that biodiversity loss can reduce ecosystem functioning, thus providing support for the conservation of biological diversity1-4. Much of the evidence for this relationship is drawn from biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiments (hereafter: biodiversity experiments), in which biodiversity loss is simulated by randomly assembling communities of varying species diversity, and ecosystem functions are measured5-9. This random assembly has led some ecologists to question the relevance of biodiversity experiments to real-world ecosystems, where community assembly may often be non-random and influenced by external drivers, such as climate or land-use intensification10-18. Despite these repeated criticisms, there has been no comprehensive, quantitative assessment of how experimental and real-world plant communities really differ, and whether these differences invalidate the experimental results. Here, we compare data from two of the largest and longest-running grassland biodiversity experiments globally (Jena Experiment, Germany; BioDIV, USA) to related real-world grassland plant communities in terms of their taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity and functional-trait composition. We found that plant communities of biodiversity experiments have greater variance in these compositional features than their real-world counterparts, covering almost all of the variation of the real-world communities (82-96%) while also containing community types that are not currently observed in the real world. We then re-analysed a subset of experimental data that included only ecologically-realistic communities, i.e. those comparable to real-world communities. For ten out of twelve biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships, biodiversity effects did not differ significantly between the full dataset of biodiversity experiments and the ecologically-realistic subset of experimental communities. This demonstrates that the results of biodiversity experiments are largely insensitive to the inclusion/exclusion of unrealistic communities. By bridging the gap between experimental and real-world studies, these results demonstrate the validity of inferences from biodiversity experiments, a key step in translating their results into specific recommendations for real-world biodiversity management.

ecology↗