Understanding the stability dynamics of naturally occurring grassland succession under nutrient enrichment is crucial for effective ecosystem management. We carried out an 11‐year field experiment to examine how grassland community stability responds to nitrogen (N) enrichment across the three successional stages (early‐, mid‐ and late‐successional stages). Our results showed that stability did not increase linearly over time; instead, natural successional grasslands became less stable in later stages due to a loss of species diversity. However, N enrichment helped slow this decline by strengthening population stability. We also found that in the early successional stage, species asynchrony driven by compensatory effects supports community stability, while in the mid‐ and late‐successional stages, it is maintained by the conservative growth strategies of dominant species. These results highlight the importance of stage‐specific nitrogen management, where reducing inputs during early stages maintains diversity‐driven asynchrony, and moderate applications in later stages promote population stability.

Primary producers shape terrestrial biodiversity, but most research has focused on vascular plants, while the role of cryptogams (mosses, lichens and algae) remains under‐explored. Cryptogams dominate Antarctic vegetation and support diverse microarthropod communities. However, how cryptogam traits influence these communities remains poorly understood. We therefore investigated the role of 28 cryptogam species and one vascular plant, via their functional traits, in shaping microarthropod communities across three contrasting sites (Signy Island, Byers Peninsula and Rothera) in the maritime Antarctic. We hypothesized that vegetation nitrogen and moisture content, major microarthropod taxa, and abiotic drivers interact to influence community patterns. Vegetation type effects on total microarthropod abundance were context‐dependent. Mosses hosted more microarthropods than lichens at Signy Island, but these differences diminished further south. Microarthropod richness and springtail abundance were consistently higher in mosses than lichens across all sites, whereas mite abundance did not differ between vegetation types. Cryptogam nitrogen and moisture content strongly predicted microarthropod community patterns, although their influence varied with vegetation type and location. Among mosses, moisture increased springtail abundance but reduced diversity due to the dominance of Cryptopygus antarcticus . In lichens, nitrogen had a stronger influence than in mosses, particularly on mite abundance and Shannon diversity. As hypothesized, moisture was more important at the harshest southern site, while nitrogen had stronger effects at more productive northern locations. These findings emphasize that the influence of cryptogam traits in structuring Antarctic terrestrial biodiversity is modulated by the environmental context. With future shifts predicted in vegetation composition, the functional traits of emerging dominant species may restructure microarthropod communities and their ecological functions.

Theoretical and empirical evidence indicates that biodiversity, species coexistence, and community stability are interconnected; however, the mechanisms underlying these associations remain poorly understood, particularly in aquatic ecosystems mediated by macrophytes. Here, we conducted a comprehensive investigation of microbial communities in bulk and Phragmites australis rhizosphere across 26 lake littoral zones of typical plain and plateau in China, and evaluated the microbial stability based on the community mean tolerance breadth, community mean response asynchrony, and network stability. We found the rhizosphere significantly enhanced bacterial and fungal richness, community mean tolerance breadth, and niche breadth compared to bulk. This enhancement was primarily driven by an overall increase in species richness, rather than by selectively promoting generalists or specialists. Rhizosphere microbial members displayed increased niche overlap and species competition, along with enhanced network complexity and stability, both within and between bacterial and fungal communities. Structural equation modeling indicated that fungal taxa exhibited a competitive advantage over bacterial members in maintaining community stability within the rhizosphere. Therefore, our study demonstrates that the rhizosphere enhances microbial community stability primarily by expanding overall species richness and intensifying competitive interactions. These findings advance the understanding of plant‐mediated microbiome stabilization and have significant implications for predicting ecosystem resilience in freshwater habitats under environmental change.

The scientific community remains divided on the most effective way to design landscapes for biodiversity conservation or restoration. Although there is a consensus that habitat loss is the main cause of biodiversity decline worldwide, the extent to which fragmentation (i.e. the division of remaining habitats into smaller areas) contributes to this decline is a subject of ongoing debate. The spatial arrangement of remaining patches and the nature and permeability of the intermediate matrix (i.e. how easily animals can move through it) are other elements related to habitat loss that are little considered. A better understanding of the effects of these factors on populations could help the community move forward. Here, we conducted a multigenerational, landscape‐scale experiment with the microarthropod Folsomia candida and quantified the respective effects of matrix resistance and inter‐patch distance on colonization rate, population size and extinction, at fixed habitat amount. We found that the amount of reachable habitat in the landscape, encompassing both the quantity of habitat and the matrix resistance, is a good predictor of population size and extinction rate. Survival of individuals while crossing different matrix types was the key underlying mechanism, as it determined both colonization rate and demography, preventing individuals from reaching and using remote or difficult‐to‐access patches. Our study shows that an explicit consideration of matrix resistance considerably improves both our understanding and our predictive ability of populations fate at landscape‐scale. It also opens new avenues for landscape ecology theory as well as long‐awaited perspectives for applied conservation.

River networks are complex ecosystems characterized by a continuous exchange of material and energy through longitudinal gradients. These ecosystems are threatened by various human‐induced stressors, which frequently co‐occur and may interact in complex ways, potentially triggering cascading effects throughout the river network. Aiming at assessing single and combined effects of flow intermittency and light pollution on macroinvertebrate communities, we performed a multiple stressors experiment in 18 flow‐through mesocosms. Each mesocosm was designed to mimic a simplified river network, with two upstream tributaries merging downstream, allowing us to assess both local and cascading effects. The experiment was performed in summer 2021 over seven weeks, applying the stressors either separately or co‐occurring in the upstream sections, following a randomized block design. Flow intermittency was simulated as the ponded phase of the drying process, whereas light pollution was applied with LED strips set to 10 lux. Drifting macroinvertebrates were sampled weekly during the treatment phase, and benthic macroinvertebrates were sampled at the end of the treatment phase. Both stressors, when applied individually, reduced benthos richness and abundance, whereas drift decreased with flow intermittency and increased with light pollution. When co‐occurring upstream, stressors showed the dominant effects of flow intermittency on the benthos and interactive effects on the drift. The effects of the single stressors and their interactions cascaded along the river network, with stronger downstream effects when stressors co‐occurred upstream. These findings show that the spatial distribution of multiple stressors along the river network can affect their resultant downstream effects, highlighting the importance of framing multiple‐stressors research in a spatial context. Considering the pressing needs of the growing human population, our results represent a step forward in anticipating the effects of cumulative stressors and in informing efficient conservation strategies for protecting freshwater ecosystems.

Tree‐related microhabitats (TreMs), such as water‐filled tree holes (WTHs), are important structures for forest biodiversity, providing habitats for many specialized species, which are however impaired by the intensive forest management of the past. Strategies to maintain and promote TreMs in managed forests, e.g. by establishing old‐growth forest patches as stepping stones, have been implemented, but their success has rarely been tested. We experimentally created WTHs in old‐growth patches that were established to connect forest nature reserves (FNRs) in a beech forest in Germany. Eight years after creation, we sampled, identified, and measured traits of the invertebrate community that colonized the WTHs. We then investigated how spatial and environmental variables affected taxonomic and functional attributes of communities and populations. A total of 2407 individuals of 13 species were sampled, the majority of which were insect larvae. Abundance, as well as taxonomic and functional diversity attributes and community composition, were influenced by environmental and spatial factors, generally supporting the patch‐dynamics and species‐sorting metacommunity archetype. At the population level, both spatial and environmental factors affected the abundance and functional diversity of body size distributions, suggesting that dispersal capacities, microhabitat requirements, and competitive abilities of individual species structure communities. The distance to the FNRs had a positive effect on total invertebrate abundance and the abundance of the specialized marsh beetle Prionocyphon serricornis , and a weak negative effect on the functional diversity of the community. Our study underpins the stepping‐stone concept of connecting FNRs. The species colonized all newly created microhabitats from source populations, indicating that these patches increase connectivity between the FNRs and thus contribute to forest biodiversity conservation. The negative effects of distance to FNRs on functional diversity suggest that distances between habitat patches should be kept small for such a strategy to be successful and sustainable in the long term.

As key members of the terrestrial food webs and vital contributors to wood decomposition, beetles play essential roles in ecosystem services but are experiencing widespread declines under climate change. While protecting and restoring forests with high tree species diversity is widely acknowledged as a nature‐based solution for climate change mitigation, it remains uncertain whether it helps maintain the stability of higher trophic communities (e.g. beetles) under climate change. Here, we used the comprehensive forest and ground‐dwelling beetle inventory dataset spanning the entire latitudinal range of the Japanese archipelago, monitored from 2004 to 2018, to investigate how tree species diversity affects the temporal stability of beetle biomass. We found that tree species diversity increased beetle biomass and its temporal stability. Specifically, higher tree diversity supported greater beetle and trophic diversity, which enhanced the asynchronous population dynamics across species and trophic levels (i.e. species and trophic asynchrony). Meanwhile, higher beetle and trophic diversity promoted temporal stability at the species level (i.e. species stability). Higher asynchrony and species stability jointly increased temporal stability within beetle communities. Our results underscore the potential of conservation efforts targeting forest diversity to uphold the ecosystem functions of higher trophic level communities (e.g. beetles) under climate change.

Cultivation by humans is the primary mode of introduction for naturalized plants and an important driver of naturalization, a critical step in the invasion process. Historical records of cultivated plants can represent introduced species pools and propagule pressure, allowing for tests of how species' traits and environmental context affect naturalization while accounting for human influence. Ruderal traits, which generally promote naturalization, may not be universally advantageous across closed versus open landscapes (forest versus grassland/shrubland) or different agricultural land use conversion types, though such context dependence has not yet been demonstrated at a broad scale. We analyzed the naturalization of 3949 cultivated ornamental non‐native plant taxa that were for sale in nursery and seed catalogs in the conterminous United States during a period over 200 years to test for context dependence between traits associated with ruderality (short lifespan, shade intolerance, and self‐compatibility) and estimates of historical forest/grassland cover and agricultural land use change. We found that present‐day naturalization was closely tied to longer cultivation duration and greater cultivation extent. While ruderal traits tended to promote naturalization, perennial lifespan and shade tolerance favored naturalization in US states with higher forest cover, which is consistent with an alternative invasion strategy in closed‐canopy systems. Land use conversion to pasture and succession of abandoned agricultural land promoted naturalization of disturbance‐adapted plants in both forest and grassland landscapes. Our results emphasize the central role of cultivation in plant invasion and provide spatially and temporally extensive evidence that, while ruderal traits are important predictors of naturalization, they are dependent on the landscape context into which plants are introduced. Our work demonstrates the importance of integrating historical cultivation and land use/cover data for a nuanced understanding of the ecological factors that drive plant naturalization.

Species distribution models (SDMs), broadly referring to both species distribution and ecological niche modelling frameworks, are widely used to predict habitat suitability. However, their performance can be biased by uneven sampling effort in occurrence data. Building on two existing approaches, we propose a novel method for sampling bias correction, consisting of the estimation of observer kernel densities for individual species and their subsequent weighting according to the relative contribution of individual observers to the total number of focus species presences. This approach, the ‘presence‐weighted observer‐oriented approach' (PW‐OOA), aimed to provide a better estimation of sampling effort, thus further improving SDM prediction performance. Using bird occurrence data from the Czech Republic, we modelled the distributions of 109 species using four approaches to bias correction: spatial thinning of species presences (STSP), target group occurrences background (TGOB), TGOB+ (tuned up by adjusting kernel smoothing bandwidths) and the new PW‐OOA method. We compared the results with simple random background sampling. Models were evaluated using independent reference (presence–absence) data. The PW‐OOA method outperformed the other approaches, with the greatest improvement detected for species with higher prevalence. However, as internal validation can be misleading with biased occurrences, we recommend TGOB+ as the most robust approach without independent data; with such data, PW‐OOA is superior. While no single optimal combination of bandwidth and observers' weights was identified across species, the PW‐OOA method provides a flexible framework to account for observer‐specific sampling biases. This study demonstrates the crucial importance of considering the behavior of individual observers and sampling intensity smoothing when correcting for sampling bias in SDMs based on unstructured opportunistic occurrence data.

Human activities have significantly modified habitats, resulting in a global biodiversity crisis. In this study, we leveraged the first national‐scale biodiversity survey based on airborne environmental DNA, comparing the effects of three human pressure indices increasing in complexity and scope – a binary urban–rural index, an index integrating land cover and pollutant concentrations as a proxy of human activity, and the composite human footprint index – across mammals, birds, insects, plants and fungi. While most taxa exhibited higher diversity in urban areas compared to rural ones, we uncovered more complex patterns using the landscape‐pollution and human footprint indices, including dual diversity maxima at both high and moderate levels of human pressure. We also show an effect of human pressure on community composition even when local species richness remained stable: regardless of the human pressure index, anthropogenic sites were mostly characterized by synanthropic and invasive species. Overall, our results underscore the complex interactions among anthropogenic pressures, taxon diversity and community composition, demonstrating the value of multi‐taxon analyses and multiple indices to better understand biodiversity patterns at large scales.