In the context of a recent massive increase in research on plant root functions and their
impact on the environment, root ecologists currently face many important challenges to keep …

Approximately 25 years ago, ecologists became increasingly interested in the question of
whether ongoing biodiversity loss matters for the functioning of ecosystems. As such, a new …

Relationships between biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions (that is, ecosystem
multifunctionality) are context-dependent. Both plant and soil microbial diversity have been …

The effects of plants on the biosphere, atmosphere and geosphere are key determinants of
terrestrial ecosystem functioning. However, despite substantial progress made regarding …

Earth is home to over 350,000 vascular plant species that differ in their traits in innumerable
ways. A key challenge is to predict how natural or anthropogenically driven changes in the …

One of ecology's grand challenges is developing general rules to explain and predict highly
complex systems. Understanding and predicting ecological processes from species' traits …

The insurance hypothesis, stating that biodiversity can increase ecosystem stability, has
received wide research and political attention. Recent experiments suggest that climate …

A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated that biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem
functioning over time in grassland ecosystems. However, the relative importance of different …

Understanding the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning has been a
core ecological research topic over the past decades. Although a key hypothesis is that the …

Owing to the conceptual complexity of functional diversity (FD), a multitude of different
methods are available for measuring it, with most being operational at only a small range of …