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Human-driven environmental changes can induce marked shifts in the functional structure of biological communities with possible repercussion on important ecosystem functions and services. At the same time it remains unclear to which extent these changes may differently affect various types of organisms. We investigated species richness and community functional structure of species assemblages at the landscape scale (1km2 plots) for two contrasting model taxa, i.e., plants (producers and sessile organisms) and birds (consumers and mobile organisms), along topography, climate, landscape heterogeneity, and land-use (agriculture and urbanization) gradients in a densely populated region of Switzerland. Our study revealed that agricultural and urban land uses drove marked shifts in the functional structure of biological communities compared to changes along climate and topography gradients, especially for plants, while for birds these changes were comparable. Agricultural and urban land uses enhanced divergence in traits related to resource use for birds (diet and nesting), growth forms, dispersal, and reproductive traits for plants, while it induced convergence in vegetative plant traits (plant height and leaf dry matter content). These results suggest that contrasting assembly patterns may arise within and across taxonomic groups along the same environmental gradients as result of distinct underlying processes and 'organism-specific' environmental perceptions. Our results further suggest a potential homogenization of biological communities, as well as low functional diversity and redundancy levels of bird assemblages in our human-dominated study region. This might potentially compromise the maintenance of key ecological processes under future environmental changes. SES for plant and bird functional traits based on 1000 randomizationsSES_Data.zip

Aim Temporal dynamics of biodiversity along tropical elevational gradients are unknown. We studied seasonal changes of Lepidoptera biodiversity along the only complete forest elevational gradient in the Afrotropics. We focused on shifts of species richness patterns, seasonal turnover of communities, and seasonal shifts of species’ elevational ranges, the latter often serving as an indicator of the global change effects on mountain ecosystems. Location Mount Cameroon, Cameroon. Taxon Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) Methods We quantitatively sampled nine groups of Lepidoptera by bait-trapping (16,800 trap-days) and light-catching (126 nights) at seven elevations evenly distributed along the elevational gradient from sea level (30 m asl) to timberline (2,200 m asl). Sampling was repeated in three seasons. Result Altogether, 42,936 specimens of 1,099 species were recorded. A mid-elevation peak of species richness was detected for all groups but Eupterotidae. This peak shifted seasonally for five groups, most of them ascending during the dry season. Seasonal shifts of species’ elevational ranges were mostly responsible for these diversity pattern shifts along elevation: we found general upward shifts in fruit-feeding butterflies, fruit-feeding moths and Lymantriinae from beginning to end of the dry season. Contrarily, Arctiinae shifted upwards during the wet season. The average seasonal shifts of elevational ranges often exceeded 100 metres and were even several times higher for numerous species. Main conclusion We report seasonal uphill and downhill shifts of several lepidopteran groups. The reported shifts can be driven by both delay in weather seasonality and shifts in resource availability, causing phenological delay of adult hatching and/or adult migrations. Such shifts may lead to misinterpretations of diversity patterns along elevation if seasonality is ignored. More importantly, considering the surprising extent of seasonal elevational shifts of species, we encourage taking account of such natural temporal dynamics while investigating the global climate change impact on communities of Lepidoptera in tropical mountains. The dataset was collected by two methodologies: 1/ bait-trapping and 2/ manual catching of target group at light. See Maicher et al. (2019) for details.

The database compiled of investment costs of houses completed by suppliers. Only unified houses are considered (standardised for repetition). Houses based on individual design are not included in the database.The database was compiled in the period from February to April 2020 and in the end, bids from 38 suppliers were considered. Only complete bids, including information. Also, the price of the project was considered to keep comparable bids, due to more than 48.6% of bids containing cost for the projects as well. All bids were available on the websites of house suppliers and included completed houses. The bids were not affected by location, and contained transportation and groundwork costs. Easy available terrain and good soil extractability was assumed for all houses, thus conditions of all bids can be considered comparable.

Despite the dramatic phenological responses of fungal fruiting to recent climate warming, it is unknown whether spatial distributions of fungi have changed and to what extent such changes are influenced by fungal traits, such as ectomycorrhizal (ECM) or saprotrophic lifestyles, spore characteristics, or fruit body size. Our overall aim was to understand how climate and fungal traits determine whether and how species-specific fungal fruit body abundances have shifted across latitudes over time, using the UK national database of fruiting records. The data employed were recorded over 45 years (1970 – 2014), and include 853,278 records of Agaricales, Boletales and Russulales, though we focus only on the most common species (with more than 3,000 records each). The georeferenced observations were analysed by a Bayesian inference as a Gaussian Additive Model with a specification following a joint species distribution model. We used an offset, random contributions and fixed effects to isolate different potential biases from the trait-specific interactions with latitude/climate and time. Our main aim was assessed by examination of the three-way-interaction of trait, predictor (latitude or climate) and time. The results show a strong trait-specific shift in latitudinal abundance through time, as ECM species have become more abundant relative to saprotrophic species in the north. Along precipitation gradients, phenology was important, in that species with shorter fruiting seasons have declined markedly in abundance in oceanic regions, whereas species with longer seasons have become relatively more common overall. These changes in fruit body distributions are correlated with temperature and rainfall, which act directly on both saprotrophic and ECM fungi, and also indirectly on ECM fungi, through altered photosynthate allocation from their hosts. If these distributional changes reflect fungal activity, there will be important consequences for the responses of forest ecosystems to changing climate, through effects on primary production and nutrient cycling. Gange et al EcographyInput raw data for all analyses. The file includes record information about taxonomy (species), location, traits and environmental data associated with each record.

A space-time extremely randomised trees model was used to estimate daily (between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.) PM2.5 concentrations with 1 km spatial resolution for a three-year period 2018–2020 over Europe. Satellite remote sensing, meteorological data, and land variables were used as the independent variables, PM2.5 ground-observations were used as the dependent variable while building the model. This work is co-financed under Grant Agreement Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Telecom project 2018-EU-IA-0095 by the European Union.

The set consists of 5 files that constitute the main calculations of ammonia emissions over Europe for the years 2013-2020. The detailed description of variables follows: 1) PriorEmission.nc - Pall: tensor of the size 240 x 200 x 12 x 8 (lat x lon x months x years) with ammonia prior emissions used in the study [ng/m2/s] 2) PosteriorEmission.nc - Xall: tensor of the size 240 x 200 x 12 x 8 (lat x lon x months x years) with ammonia posterior emissions [ng/m2/s] 3) UncertaintyEmission.nc - Uall: tensor of the size 240 x 200 x 12 x 8 (lat x lon x months x years) with uncertainty of posterior emissions [ng/m2/s] 4) stations_vmodVSobs.mat - st_list: list of stations identifiers, 53 stations in total - st_coord: stations coordinates [lot,lat] - st_OBSdays: matrix of the size 53 x (366*8) with observations in daily resolution [ug/m3] - st_ind_obs: logical matrix of the size 53 x (366*8) with indicators when each station provides observation (1) and when not (0) - st_prior_vmod_days: matrix of the size 53 x (366*8) with calculated concentrations using model with prior emission [ug/m3]- st_post_vmod_days: matrix of the size 53 x (366*8) with calculated concentrations using model with posterior emission [ug/m3] - st_prior1_vmod_days: same as st_prior_vmod_days for EC6G4 prior - st_prior2_vmod_days: same as st_prior_vmod_days for EGG prior - st_prior3_vmod_days: same as st_prior_vmod_days for NE prior - st_prior4_vmod_days: same as st_prior_vmod_days for VD prior

Data sets of fish growth, population viability and climate across Europe.

Environmentally induced epigenetic variation has been recently recognized as a possible mechanism allowing plants to rapidly adapt to novel conditions. Despite increasing evidence on the topic, little is known on how epigenetic variation affects responses of natural populations to changing climate. We studied the effects of experimental demethylation (DNA methylation is an important mediator of heritable control of gene expression) on performance of a clonal grass, Festuca rubra, coming from localities with contrasting temperature and moisture regimes. We compared performance of demethylated and control plants from different populations under two contrasting climatic scenarios and explored whether the response to demethylation depended on genetic relatedness of the plants. Demethylation significantly affected plant performance. Its effects interacted with population of origin and partly with conditions of cultivation. The effects of demethylation also varied between distinct genotypes with more closely related genotypes showing more similar response to demethylation. For belowground biomass, demethylated plants showed signs of adaptation to drought that were not apparent in plants that were naturally methylated. The results suggest that DNA methylation may modify the response of this species to moisture. DNA methylation may thus affect the ability of clonal plants to adapt to novel climatic conditions. Whether this variation in DNA methylation may also occur under natural conditions, however, remains to be explored. Despite the significant interactions between population of origin and demethylation, our data do not provide clear evidence that DNA methylation enabled adaptation to different environments. In fact, we obtained stronger evidence of local adaptation in demethylated than in naturally-methylated plants. As changes in DNA methylation may be quite dynamic, it is thus possible that epigenetic variation can mask plant adaptations to conditions of their origin due to pre-cultivation of the plants under standardized conditions. This possibility should be considered in future experiments exploring plant adaptations. Epig-dryadData on plant performance in the experiment

In a world of accelerating changes in environmental conditions driving tree growth, tradeoffs between tree growth rate and longevity could curtail the abundance of large, old trees (LOTs), with potentially dire consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage. However, the influence of tree-level tradeoffs on forest structure at landscape scales will also depend on disturbances, which shape tree size and age distribution, and on whether LOTs can benefit from improved growing conditions due to climate warming. We analyzed temporal and spatial variation in radial growth patterns from ~5000 Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) H. Karst) live and dead trees from the Western Carpathian primary spruce forest stands. We applied mixed-linear modeling to quantify the importance of LOT growth histories and stand dynamics (i.e. competition and disturbance factors) on lifespan. Finally, we assessed regional synchronization in radial growth variability over the 20th century, and modelled the effects of stand dynamics and climate on LOTs recent growth trends. Tree age varied considerably among forest stands, implying an important role of disturbance as an age constraint. Slow juvenile growth and longer period of suppressed growth prolonged tree lifespan, while increasing disturbance severity and shorter time since last disturbance decreased it. The highest age was not achieved only by trees with continuous slow growth, but those with slow juvenile growth followed by subsequent growth releases. Growth trend analysis demonstrated an increase in absolute growth rates in response to climate warming, with late summer temperatures driving the recent growth trend. Contrary to our expectation that LOTs would eventually exhibit declining growth rates, the oldest LOTs (>400 years) continuously increase growth throughout their lives, indicating a high phenotypic plasticity of LOTs for increasing biomass, and a strong carbon sink role of primary spruce forests under rising temperatures, intensifying droughts, and increasing bark beetle outbreaks.