Abstract
Abstract Climate change is a world‐wide threat to biodiversity and ecosystem structure, functioning and services. To understand the underlying drivers and mechanisms, and to predict the consequences for nature and people, we urgently need better understanding of the direction and magnitude of climate change impacts across the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. An increasing number of climate change studies are creating new opportunities for meaningful and high‐quality generalizations and improved process understanding. However, significant challenges exist related to data availability and/or compatibility across studies, compromising opportunities for data re‐use, synthesis and upscaling. Many of these challenges relate to a lack of an established ‘best practice’ for measuring key impacts and responses. This restrains our current understanding of complex processes and mechanisms in terrestrial ecosystems related to climate change. To overcome these challenges, we collected best‐practice methods emerging from major ecological research networks and experiments, as synthesized by 115 experts from across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Our handbook contains guidance on the selection of response variables for different purposes, protocols for standardized measurements of 66 such response variables and advice on data management. Specifically, we recommend a minimum subset of variables that should be collected in all climate change studies to allow data re‐use and synthesis, and give guidance on additional variables critical for different types of synthesis and upscaling. The goal of this community effort is to facilitate awareness of the importance and broader application of standardized methods to promote data re‐use, availability, compatibility and transparency. We envision improved research practices that will increase returns on investments in individual research projects, facilitate second‐order research outputs and create opportunities for collaboration across scientific communities. Ultimately, this should significantly improve the quality and impact of the science, which is required to fulfil society's needs in a changing world.
Highlights
Climate change is an increasing threat to biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services world-wide (IPBES, 2019; Pacifici et al, 2015; Schuur et al, 2015)
Through a community effort by experts across scientific disciplines (Box 1), we provide a comprehensive collection of state-of-the-art methods and sampling protocols on key variables of relevance for terrestrial climate change research (Table 1)
The growing interest in data re-use, synthesis and upscaling within and across experiments and observations highlights challenges and pitfalls regarding the downstream use of knowledge from these studies, especially regarding data availability and data compatibility across studies (Denny et al, 2014; Firbank et al, 2017; Vicca, Gilgen, et al, 2012) and the lack of basic study information or covariates necessary for comparison (Gerstner et al, 2017; Haddaway & Verhoeven, 2015; Halbritter et al, 2018)
Summary
Climate change is an increasing threat to biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services world-wide (IPBES, 2019; Pacifici et al, 2015; Schuur et al, 2015). Numerous studies, including experiments, long-term monitoring, resampling of historic data and various kinds of space-for-time approaches, have been and are being conducted. Such studies address climate and other global change-related questions for various players and processes in ecosystems across the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. Plants interact with other plants, microbes, invertebrates and other organisms in multiple ways and on different trophic levels (e.g. decomposers, mutualists, pathogens, herbivores, predators). Together, they play a major role in controlling important terrestrial ecosystem processes such as carbon and nutrient cycling (Clemmensen et al, 2013). Improved understanding of the magnitude of climate change impacts, the underlying drivers and mechanisms and the ecological consequences at the individual, population, community and ecosystem scales across the soil–plant– continuum, with a focus on first-order plant–animal interactions in detritivore and herbivore food web is urgently needed
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
