Ecosystem transformation by climate change and its consequences for humans

Detecting vulnerability of humid tropical forests to multiple stressors

Ecosystem coupling: A unifying framework to understand the functioning and recovery of ecosystems

Climate extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, extreme rainfall can lead to harvest failures, flooding and consequently threaten the food security worldwide. Improving our understanding about climate extremes can mitigate the worst impacts of climate change and extremes. The objective here is to investigate the changes in climate and climate extremes by considering two time slices (i.e., 1962–1990 and 1991–2019) in all climate zones of Pakistan by utilizing observed data from 54 meteorological stations. Different statistical methods and techniques were applied on observed station data to assess changes in temperature, precipitation and spatio-temporal trends of climatic extremes over Pakistan from 1962 to 2019. The Mann-Kendal test demonstrated increasing precipitation (DJF) and decreasing maximum and minimum temperatures (JJA) at the meteorological stations located in the Karakoram region during 1962–1990. The decadal analysis, on the other hand, showed a decrease in precipitation during 1991–2019 and an increase in temperature (maximum and minimum) during 2010–2019, which is consistent with the recently observed slight mass loss of glaciers related to the Karakoram Anomaly. These changes are highly significant at 5% level of significance at most of the stations. In case of temperature extremes, summer days (SU25) increased except in zone 4, TX10p (cold days) decreased across the country during 1962–1990, except for zones 1 and 2. TX90p (warm days) increased between 1991–2019, with the exception of zone 5, and decreased during 1962–1990, with the exception of zones 2 and 5. The spatio-temporal trend of consecutive dry days (CDD) indicated a rising tendency from 1991 to 2019, with the exception of zone 4, which showed a decreasing trend. PRCPTOT (annual total wet-day precipitation), R10 (number of heavy precipitation days), R20 (number of very heavy precipitation days), and R25mm (very heavy precipitation days) increased (decreased) considerably in the North Pakistan during 1962–1990 (1991–2019). The findings of this study can help to address some of the sustainable development goals related climate action, hunger and environment. In addition, the findings can help in developing sustainable adaptation and mitigation strategies against climate change and extremes. As the climate and extremes conditions are not the uniform in all climate zone, therefore, it is suggested to the formers and agriculture department to harvest crops resilient to the climatic condition of each zone. Temperature has increasing trend in the northern Pakistan, therefore, the concerned stakeholders need to make rational plans for higher river flow/flood situation due to snow and glacier melt.

Extinction in the Anthropocene.

In many regions on Earth, past and current changes in temperature, rainfall patterns, and snow cover are concomitant with changes in atmospheric pollution, probably causing interactive but overlooked impacts on ecosystems. However, in global-change ecology, we often study the interactive effects of climate changes (mainly temperature warming) and chemical pollution experimentally at short spatio-temporal scales and in controlled conditions. As a result, how these global change factors interact to shape long-term population dynamics in natural ecosystems, remains little known. As a key example, the European Black Triangle — the region at the borders of former Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Poland — was heavily air polluted in the 1970s and 1980s due to emissions from coal power plants, resulting in high loads of toxic element deposition (e.g., lead). In the Ore Mountains, within the Black Triangle region, we collected during 40 years (twice a year in June and October) the abundances of six small-mammal species belonging to three trophic guilds (omnivores, insectivores, and herbivores). We complemented this dataset with atmospheric pollution (SO₂, NOx, and total Particulate Matter), temperature, snow cover, and runoff (snowmelt and rainfall) historical data. Firstly, we studied the local stability (Lyapunov local stability) of the global change factors and small-mammal multivariate time series, respectively, and identified that periods of instability in climate and atmospheric pollution were preceding periods of small-mammal assemblage instability. Secondly, we used Bayesian Multivariate (Dynamic) Generalized Additive Models (MDGAMs) to test contrasting hypotheses on how different climate factors (snow cover, runoff, and temperature) may interact with temporal changes in pollution in a trophic-guild-specific manner. We showed evidence for guild-specific effects of climatic variables and atmospheric pollution. For instance, the strength of the negative interaction between runoff and atmospheric pollution on population dynamics depended on the trophic guild, with stronger negative effects on omnivores. We finish by discussing the implications of our findings on how global change factors contribute to community dynamics, and what this entails for species coexistence and biodiversity conservation amid ongoing changes in climate and atmospheric chemical composition.

Microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) is a key parameter of initial microbial utilization of organic matter in soil. The responses of CUE to global change factors (GCFs) remain unclear due to their multiple effects and interactions. Here, this study generalized 385 observations obtained using various methods, including 13C-/14C-labeled substrates, 18O-labeled water, stoichiometric modeling, and others. The effects of climate change (drought, precipitation, warming), fertilization (nitrogen addition, phosphorus addition, potassium addition, and nitrogen fertilization combined with phosphorus and potassium), land use conversion, and natural restoration, were evaluated along with their 16 associated GCFs on CUE. CUE was insensitive to climate change factors and most fertilization practices, maintaining a mean value of 0.36 under global change scenarios. Farmland conversion to forest and vegetation restoration decreased CUE by 11% and 17%, respectively. Grassland restoration increased CUE by 41%, indicating that grasslands have high potential for soil carbon accrual. Nitrogen fertilization combined with phosphorus and potassium increased CUE by 18% because the combined application of nutrients allows plants to produce organic matter sources with high-quality and decreases nutrient limitations for microorganisms. Increase in soil pH induced by GCFs leads to higher CUE. The CUE was decoupled from soil organic carbon content under several global change scenarios (e.g., warming, fertilization), suggesting that this relationship is not universally consistent across GCFs. This study provides a new perspective on the responses of CUE to GCFs and deepens our understanding of the global change effects on microbial physiology with consequences for soil carbon cycling.

Review of historical and projected future climatic and hydrological changes in mountainous semiarid Xinjiang (northwestern China), central Asia

Relative impacts of multiple global change factors on ecohydrological processes in terrestrial ecosystems have not been carefully studied. In this study, we used a terrestrial ecosystem (TECO) model to examine effects of three global change factors (i.e., climate warming, elevated CO2, and altered precipitation) individually and in combination on runoff, evaporation, transpiration, rooting zone soil moisture content, water use efficiency (WUE), and rain use efficiency (RUE) in a North American tallgrass prairie. We conducted a total of 200 different scenarios with gradual changes of the three factors for 100 years. Our modeling results show strong responses of runoff, evaporation, transpiration, and rooting zone soil moisture to changes in temperature and precipitation, while effects of CO2 changes were relatively minor. For example, runoff decreased by 50% with a 10°C increase in temperature and increased by 250% with doubled precipitation. Ecosystem‐level RUE increased with CO2, decreased with precipitation, and optimized at 4–6°C of warming. In contrast, plant‐level WUE was highest at doubled CO2, doubled precipitation, and ambient temperature. The different response patterns of RUE and WUE signify that processes at different scales responded uniquely to climate change. Combinations of temperature, CO2, and precipitation anomalies interactively affected response magnitude and/or patterns of ecohydrological processes. Our results suggest that ecohydrological processes were considerably affected by global change factors and then likely regulate other ecosystem processes, such as carbon and nitrogen cycling. In particular, substantial changes in runoff to different climate change scenarios could have policy implications because it is a major component to replenishing freshwater. These modeling results should be tested by and could influence design of field experiments on ecohydrological processes.

Semi-arid African ecosystems influence trends and variability in global terrestrial carbon dynamics. However, there are uncertainties in potential effects of future climates for semi-arid ecosystems, especially for niche ecosystems. At the same time, African ecosystems provide the livelihoods and ecosystem services for around 1.4 billion people. Future population growth and associated changes in land use pose a challenge for the protection of African biodiversity. Therefore, this work focussed on future impacts of climate change on African ecosystems and carbon dynamics and also for African protected areas (PAs), where they may cooccur with other global change factors. Another focus was on uncertainties associated with future projections and with modelling the Nama Karoo, as an example of a semi-arid niche ecosystem. Dynamic vegetation models (DVMs) were the main research tool. In Chapter 2, we analysed climate change impacts on African ecosystems and carbon pools until the end of the 21st century and associated uncertainties based on an ensemble of vegetation simulations with the DVM adaptive dynamic vegetation model (aDGVM). We investigated the impact of increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations and two climate change scenarios (medium (RCP4.5) and high emissions (RCP8.5); RCP - representative concentration pathway) on vegetation changes. Differences in the simulated vegetation were primarily driven by assumptions about the influence of CO2 on plants. Elevated CO2 concentrations led to increased total aboveground vegetation biomass and shrub encroachment into grasslands and savannas for both climate scenarios. In simulations without the direct influence of CO2 on plants, there was hardly any shrub encroachment and vegetation biomass decreased or varied between a slight decrease in some cases and a slight increase in others. Based on these results, biome changes due to climate change are likely in Africa in the future. Due to the large uncertainties in future projections, strategies to adapt to climate change must be flexible. The simulated vegetation in Chapter 2 represented potential, natural vegetation and is particularly suitable to investigate PAs. However, PAs do not exist isolated from their environment and social developments. In Chapter 3, the vegetation projections with CO2 effect from Chapter 2 were combined with projections for population density and land use. Except for many PAs in North Africa, most PAs were adversely affected by at least one of the three drivers by the end of the 21st century in both investigated scenarios ("middle-of-the-road" and "fossil-fuelled development"). Cooccurrence of the drivers varied by region and scenario for PAs. Both scenarios implied increasing challenges for the conservation of African biodiversity in PAs. The impact of climate change on vegetation is likely to be exacerbated by socio-economic change for most African PAs. Strong mitigation of future climate change together with equitable societal development may facilitate successful ecosystem conservation. The simulations in Chapters 2 and 3 showed large-scale patterns of vegetation change, but their low resolution makes them unsuitable for local analyses. In Chapter 4, the challenges of simulating smaller scale, semi-arid ecosystems and their carbon cycle were analysed for the Nama Karoo with the aDGVM2 and its shrub module. The aDGVM2 is based on the aDGVM, but represents plants more flexibly. In all tested aDGVM2 configurations, the carbon fluxes improved compared to initial simulations but still overestimated them. The measured morphology of the dwarf shrubs and soil water dynamics were not reproduced in aDGVM2. Semi-arid soil water dynamics and coping strategies of semi-arid dwarf shrubs under drought stress are not adequately implemented in the aDGVM2. Further field research on semi-arid water and carbon dynamics of vegetation is necessary to parameterise the aDGVM2 for dwarf shrubs. If these challenges are overcome, DVMs can be a powerful tool for much-needed research on the impacts of climate change on the Nama Karoo. The analyses have shown that climate change under medium to high emission scenarios is likely to lead to large-scale changes in ecosystems and the carbon balance in Africa. Because lower emissions scenarios come with less uncertainty, climate change adaptation strategies likely need to be less complex or extensive if climate change is minimised. For African PAs, the challenges of climate change may be exacerbated by socio-economic factors to a regionally varying extent. This research suggests that successful ecosystem conservation depends on climate change mitigation measures and ensuring equitable, sustainable development. The shown uncertainties, e.g., in the implementation of the CO2 effect on plants or vegetation dynamics in more niche ecosystems, help to focus future research efforts and increase our understanding of the range of plausible futures we may need to adapt to.

ABSTRACTAimThe global, human‐mediated dispersal of invasive insects is a major driver of ecosystem change, biodiversity loss, crop damage and other effects. Trade flows and invasive species propagule pressure are correlated, and their relationship is essential for predicting and managing future invasions. Invaders do not disperse exclusively from the species' native range. Instead, the bridgehead effect, where established, non‐native populations act as secondary sources of propagule, is recognised as a major driver of global invasion. The resulting pattern of global spread arises from a mixture of global interactions between invasive species, their vectors and, their invaded ranges, which has yet to be fully characterised.LocationGlobal.Time Period1997–2020.Major Taxa StudiedInsects.MethodsWe analysed 319,283 border interception records of 514 insect species from a broad range of taxa from four national‐level phytosanitary organisations. We classified interceptions as coming from species native range or from bridgehead countries and examined taxonomic autocorrelation of global movement patterns between species.ResultsWhile 65% of interceptions originated from bridgehead countries, highlighting the importance of the bridgehead effect across taxa, patterns among individual species were highly variable and taxonomically correlated. Forty per cent of species originated almost exclusively from their native range, 28% almost exclusively from their non‐native range and 32% from a mix of source locations. These patterns of global dispersal were geographically widespread, temporally consistent, and taxonomically correlated.ConclusionsDispersal exclusively from bridgeheads represents an unrecognised pattern of global insect movement; these patterns emphasise the importance of the bridgehead effect and suggest that bridgeheads provide unique local conditions that allow invaders to proliferate differently than in their native range. We connect these patterns of global dispersal to the conditions during the human driven global dispersal of insects and provide recommendations for modellers and policymakers wishing to control the spread of future invasions.

Land use and climate change alter biodiversity patterns and ecosystem functioning worldwide. Land abandonment with consequent shrub encroachment and changes in precipitation gradients are known factors in global change. Yet, the consequences of interactions between these factors on the functional diversity of belowground communities remain insufficiently explored. Here, we investigated the dominant shrub effects on the functional diversity of soil nematode communities along a precipitation gradient on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. We collected three functional traits (life-history C-P value, body mass, and diet) and calculated the functional alpha and beta diversity of nematode communities using kernel density n-dimensional hypervolumes. We found that shrubs did not significantly alter the functional richness and dispersion, but significantly decreased the functional beta diversity of nematode communities in a pattern of functional homogenization. Shrubs benefited nematodes with longer life-history, larger body mass, and higher trophic levels. Moreover, the shrub effects on the functional diversity of nematodes depended strongly on precipitation. Increasing precipitation reversed the effects shrubs have on the functional richness and dispersion from negative to positive but amplified the negative effects shrubs have on functional beta diversity of nematodes. Benefactor shrubs had stronger effects on the functional alpha and beta diversity of nematodes than allelopathic shrubs along a precipitation gradient. A piecewise structural equation model showed that shrubs and its interactions with precipitation indirectly increased the functional richness and dispersion through plant biomass and soil total nitrogen, whereas it directly decreased the functional beta diversity. Our study reveals the expected changes in soil nematode functional diversity following shrub encroachment and precipitation, advancing our understanding of global climate change on nematode communities on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Elevated CO2, warming, N addition, and increased precipitation affect different aspects of the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal community

The western Himalayan region, particularly the Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh, was home to many freshwater lakes that represented ecologically critical systems sustaining high biodiversity and various essential ecosystem services, including nutrient cycling, climate regulation, and livelihood support. These lakes differed in size, altitude, and ecological characteristics. They contained diverse species of plankton and fish, which were key components of the aquatic food web, served as bioindicators of water quality, and played a crucial role in ecosystem functioning. This review aimed to assess the biodiversity and ecological integrity of freshwater lakes, with a focus on understanding the relationship between biological diversity, water quality, and environmental stressors. A systematic literature review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines. For data collection, Google Scholar, PubMed, ResearchGate, Scopus, and ScienceDirect databases were searched using relevant keywords. Studies published between 2010 and 2025 focusing on freshwater lakes of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh were included, addressing ecological integrity, including water quality, biodiversity, trophic status, and pollution. The review revealed that these lakes supported diverse and functionally important planktonic and fish communities that regulated primary productivity and acted as reliable bioindicators of water quality. However, increasing anthropogenic pressures, including pollution, urbanisation, overexploitation, and unregulated tourism, were degrading water quality and disrupting ecological balance. Climate change, particularly glacial retreat and shifting precipitation regimes, further exacerbated these impacts, accelerating ecosystem instability and biodiversity loss. Overall, the freshwater lakes of the Himalayan region were under significant stress due to anthropogenic effects and climate change, resulting in declining water quality and biodiversity loss. To prevent further biodiversity loss and maintain ecological integrity, effective conservation strategies, strict policy implementation, and community participation were required to ensure long-term ecological sustainability.

Land-use intensification can increase provisioning ecosystem services, such as food and timber production, but it also drives changes in ecosystem functioning and biodiversity loss, which may ultimately compromise human wellbeing. To understand how changes in land-use intensity affect the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services, we built networks from correlations between the species richness of 16 trophic groups, 10 ecosystem functions, and 15 ecosystem services. We evaluated how the properties of these networks varied across land-use intensity gradients for 150 forests and 150 grasslands. Land-use intensity significantly affected network structure in both habitats. Changes in connectance were larger in forests, while changes in modularity and evenness were more evident in grasslands. Our results show that increasing land-use intensity leads to more homogeneous networks with less integration within modules in both habitats, driven by the belowground compartment in grasslands, while forest responses to land management were more complex. Land-use intensity strongly altered hub identity and module composition in both habitats, showing that the positive correlations of provisioning services with biodiversity and ecosystem functions found at low land-use intensity levels, decline at higher intensity levels. Our approach provides a comprehensive view of the relationships between multiple components of biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services and how they respond to land use. This can be used to identify overall changes in the ecosystem, to derive mechanistic hypotheses, and it can be readily applied to further global change drivers.

Global climate change threatens ecosystem functioning worldwide. Forest ecosystems are particularly important for carbon sequestration, thereby buffering climate change and providing socio-economic services. However, recurrent stresses, such as heat waves, droughts and floods can affect forests with potential cascading effects on their carbon sink capacity, drought resilience and sustainability. Knowledge about the stress impact on the multitude of processes driving soil-plant-atmosphere interactions within these complex forest systems is widely lacking and uncertainty about future changes extremely high. Thus, forecasting forest response to climate change will require a dramatically improved process understanding of carbon and water cycling across various temporal (minutes to seasons) and spatial (leaf to ecosystem) scales covering atmosphere, biosphere, pedosphere and hydrosphere components. Many relevant processes controlling carbon and water exchange occur at small scales (e.g. rhizosphere, single leaf) with a high spatial and temporal variability, which is poorly constrained. However, interactions and feedback loops can be key players that amplify or dampen a system’s response to stress. Moreover, spatial and temporal scaling rules for these non-linear processes in structurally and functionally diverse ecosystems are unknown. Legacy effects, for example, altered response after previous stress and retarded recovery of forests after climate extremes, are not captured in state-of-the-art models. Currently, we are lacking the appropriate and interconnected measurement, data assimilation and modelling tools allowing for a comprehensive, real-time quantification of key processes at high spatio-temporal coverage in heterogeneous environments. Moreover, since climate impacts are highly unpredictable with respect to timing and location, future research will require novel mobile, easily deployable and cost-efficient approaches. ECOSENSE, therefore, assembles expertise from environmental and engineering sciences, both being excellently paired at the University of Freiburg. Our interdisciplinary research project will investigate all relevant scales in a next-generation ecosystem research assessment (ECOSENSE). Our vision is to detect and forecast critical changes in ecosystem functioning, based on the understanding of hierarchical process interaction. In the first phase, ECOSENSE will explore these process interactions by investigating pools and fluxes of water and carbon, i.e. CO2 exchange, isotope discrimination and volatile organic compounds (VOC), as well as stress indicators by remotely and in situ sensed chlorophyll fluorescence. To address these research tasks, ECOSENSE will develop, implement and test a distributed, autonomous, intelligent sensor network, based on novel microsensors tailored to the specific needs in remote and harsh forest environments. They will measure the spatio-temporal dynamics of ecosystem pools and fluxes in a naturally complex structured forest system with minimal physiological impact. Measured data will be transferred in real-time into a sophisticated database, which will be explored for process analysis, conducted by Artificial Intelligence and close to real-time process-based ecosystem models for now- and forecasting applications. Thereby, ECOSENSE will: i) break new ground for integrative ecosystem research by identifying hierarchies and interactions of abiotic and physiological processes of forest carbon and water exchange, ii) provide a profound understanding of complex ecosystem responses to environmental stressors and iii) enable the prediction of process-based alterations in ecosystem functioning and sustainability. Our novel ECOSENSE toolkit, tested and validated in controlled climate extreme experiments and our ECOSENSE Forest, will open new horizons for rapid assessment in vast and remote ecosystems. Thereby, ECOSENSE will allow for a unique avenue of data acquisition and, consequently, for unprecedented scale-crossing ecosystem understanding and modelling.