Background: Soil animal communities include more than 40 higher-order taxa, representing over 23% of all described species. These animals have a wide range of feeding sources and contribute to several important soil functions and ecosystem services. Although many studies have assessed macroinvertebrate communities in Brazil, few of them have been p...
Human activities have affected the surrounding natural ecosystems, including belowground microorganisms, for millennia. Their short- and medium-term effects on the diversity and the composition of soil microbial communities are well-documented, but their lasting effects remain unknown. When unoccupied for centuries, archaeological sites are appropr...
Shade trees in agroforestry systems confer ecosystem services, such as enhanced soil fertility from diverse litter inputs, microclimate regulation via shade, and disease mitigation through trophic and abiotic interactions. With this thriving role of agroforestry in sustainable agriculture, particularly for tree crops, systematic and reliable method...
Secondary tropical forests play an increasingly important role in carbon budgets and biodiversity conservation. Understanding successional trajectories is therefore imperative for guiding forest restoration and climate change mitigation efforts. Forest succession is driven by the demographic strategies—combinations of growth, mortality and recruitm...
The expansion of the oil palm industry in Indonesia has improved livelihoods in rural communities, but comes at the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation. Here, we investigated ways to balance ecological and economic outcomes of oil palm cultivation. We compared a wide range of production systems, including smallholder plantations, industr...
Climate extremes and biotic interactions at the neighbourhood scale affect tropical forest dynamics with long-term consequences for biodiversity, global carbon cycling and climate change mitigation. However, forest disturbance may change crowding intensity, and thus the relative contribution of climate extremes and neighbourhood interactions on tre...
Understanding crop domestication provides a basis for ongoing genetic improvement of crops, especially in the utilization of wild crop relatives as a source of new variation and may guide the domestication of new crops. The Asia Pacific region is home to most of the world's human population and is a region in which many important crops were domesti...
Protected areas and their peripheries harbour biodiverse ecosystems which underpin ecosystem service provision to local communities. Understanding the relationship between the species contained within these ecosystems and the utilitarian services they provide is important. However, there is a shortage of quantitative methods for assessing species' ...
Tree monocultures constitute an increasing fraction of the global tree cover and are the dominant tree-growing strategy of forest landscape restoration commitments. Their advantages to produce timber are well known, but their value for biodiversity is highly controversial and context dependent. Therefore, understanding whether, and in which conditi...
Enhancing tree diversity may be important to fostering resilience to drought-related climate extremes. So far, little attention has been given to whether tree diversity can increase the survival of trees and reduce its variability in young forest plantations. We conducted an analysis of seedling and sapling survival from 34 globally distributed tre...
