Aim Little is known about the performance of plantations relative to natural forests of the same climate zone and age. China has more plantations than any other country as a consequence of massive afforestation efforts. We use data from China to comparatively examine tree biomass and productivity of planted and natural stands in relation to climate zone, latitude, elevation, age and species div...

The assessment of climate change impacts on biodiversity has so far been biased toward the taxonomic identification of the species likely either to benefit from climate modifications or to experience overall declines. There have still been few studies intended to correlate the characteristics of species to their sensitivity to climate change, even though it is now recognized that functional tra...

Spontaneous, internally-generated variability of the climate system is pervasive. On the multidecadal time scale it dominates the variability of surface air temperature averaged over extratropical land areas as large as the contiguous United States, and it modulates the rate of rise of global mean temperature in response to the buildup of greenhouse gases. Unforced variability is one of the fac...

Weeds have been winner and will be winner in future climate change conditions because of more adaptive power and more diversity. Weed population will change with climate change and risks of invasiveness may increase. Effectiveness of current management practices may be affected. Most studies evaluated effect of single factor (elevated CO2) and only few studies have evaluated the interaction of ...

Dispersal is closely tied to the origin and maintenance of microbial diversity. With its focus on a narrow group of soil bacteria, recent work by Andam and colleagues on Streptomyces has provided perhaps the strongest support so far that some bacterial diversity in soils can be attributed to regional endemism (C. P. Andam et al., mBio 7:e02200-15, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mBio.02200-15)....

Aim Epiphytes contribute up to 30% to the number of vascular plant species in certain global biodiversity hotspots, e.g. the Ecuadorian Andes. However, their large scale diversity patterns are still discussed on the base of results from a few, local epiphyte inventories. Consequently, explanatory models on epiphyte diversity concentrate on the impact of local climate on small scale epiphyte spe...

Forest management under a changing climate requires assessing the effects of climate warming and disturbance on the composition, age structure, and spatial patterns of tree species. We investigated these effects on a boreal forest in northeastern China using a factorial experimental design and simulation modeling. We used a spatially explicit forest landscape model (LANDIS) to evaluate the effe...

The downside of diversity: a tropical problem? The most biodiverse communities in the world are located in the tropics [6]. Tropical species are widely believed to be more sensitive to climate change than their temperate counterparts because of (i) the absence of a marked latitudinal gradient of temperature within the tropics, which risk of species loss – we cannot afford to wait to construct m...

The role of marginal populations for the long-term maintenance of species' genetic diversity and evolutionary potential is particularly timely in view of the range shifts caused by climate change. The Centre-Periphery hypothesis predicts that marginal populations should bear reduced genetic diversity and have low evolutionary potential. We analysed temporal stability at neutral microsatellite a...