Forests are experiencing simultaneous changes in climate, disturbance regimes, and management, all of which affect ecosystem function. Climate change is shifting ranges and altering forest productivity. Disturbance regimes are changing with the potential for novel interactions among disturbance types. In some areas, forest management practices are intensifying, whereas in other areas, lower-imp...

The composition of a peatland plant community has considerable effect on a range of ecosystem functions. Peatland plant community structure is predicted to change under future climate change, making the quantification of the direction and magnitude of this change a research priority. We subjected intact, replicated vegetated poor fen peat monoliths to elevated temperatures, increased atmospheri...

[1] Insights into how terrestrial ecosystems affect the Earth’s response to changes in climate and rising atmospheric CO2 levels rely heavily on the predictions of terrestrial biosphere models (TBMs). These models contain detailed mechanistic representations of biological processes affecting terrestrial ecosystems; however, their ability to simultaneously predict field-based measurements of ter...

Nature provides life-support services which do not merely constitute the basis for ecosystem integrity but also benefit human societies. The importance of such multiple outputs is often ignored or underestimated in environmental planning and decision making. The economic valuation of ecosystem functions or services has been widely used to make these benefits economically visible and thus addres...

Although the concept of ecosystem sustainability has a long-term focus, it is often viewed from a static system perspective. Because most ecosystems are dynamic, we explore sustainability assessments from three additional perspectives: resilient systems; systems where tipping points occur; and systems subject to episodic resetting. Whereas foundations of ecosystem resilience originated in ecolo...

1. The goal of conservation and restoration activities is tomaintain biological diversity and the ecosystem services that this diversity provides. These activities traditionally focus on the measures of species diversity that include only information on the presence and abundance of species. Yet how diversity influences ecosystem function depends on the traits and niches filled by species. 2. B...

Bacteria are essential for many ecosystem services but our understanding of factors controlling their functioning is incomplete. While biodiversity has been identified as an important driver of ecosystem processes in macrobiotic communities, we know much less about bacterial communities. Due to the high diversity of bacterial communities, high functional redundancy is commonly proposed as expla...

This lab uses freshwater sponges as model organisms to examine the biological effects of water pollution. Specifically, the focus of this laboratory module is on the effects that chemicals of environmental concern (e.g., endocrine disrupters) have on sponge growth and development. Contamination of aquatic ecosystems is a serious issue in environmental science. Identifying which chemicals we sho...