Soils underpin terrestrial ecosystem functions, but they face numerous anthropogenic pressures. Despite their crucial ecological role, we know little about how soils react to more than two environmental factors at a time. Here, we show experimentally that increasing the number of simultaneous global change factors (up to 10) caused increasing directional changes in soil properties, soil processes, and microbial communities, though there was greater uncertainty in predicting the magnitude of change. Our study provides a blueprint for addressing multifactor change with an efficient, broadly applicable experimental design for studying the impacts of global environmental change.
All ecological disciplines consider temporal dynamics, although relevant concepts have been developed almost independently. We here introduce basic principles of temporal dynamics in ecology. We figured out essential features that describe temporal dynamics by finding similarities among about 60 ecological concepts and theories. We found that considering the hierarchically nested structure of complexity in temporal patterns (i.e. hierarchical complexity) can well describe the fundamental nature of temporal dynamics by expressing which patterns are observed at each scale. Across all ecological levels, driver-response relationships can be temporally variant and dependent on both shortand long-term past conditions. The framework can help with designing experiments, improving predictive power of statistics, and enhancing communications among ecological disciplines. The Need for Basic Principles of Temporal DynamicsAll ecological disciplines consider temporal dynamics with major paradigms shifting from one to another: equilibrium (see Glossary) to nonequilibrium, and stationary to nonstationary (Box 1). Understanding temporal dynamics is becoming more important in the Anthropocene. Several time-related concepts and statistics have emerged recently [1][2][3][4]. Nevertheless, ecology still lacks basic principles that underlie all studies relevant to temporal dynamics [5], and the exchange of knowledge about temporal dynamics among subdisciplines is limited [6,7].Recently developed concepts include, for example, temporal ecology [5], abrupt shifts in ecological systems [8], ecological memory [3], lag hypothesis for community dynamics [9], and asymptotic environmentally determined trajectories [1]. These were proposed almost independently of each other. However, they all consider that driver-response relationships are not necessarily constant through time, but they depend on the recent and historical past. This perspective brings together various concepts to figure out the essence of temporal dynamics across ecological and temporal scales. HighlightsTemporal dynamics are inherently complex.Concepts and techniques have flourished to understand ecological temporal dynamics in recent years.A key finding of recent studies is that driver-response relationships are not necessarily constant through time, but rather, that they are conditioned by the recent and historical past.Basic principles of temporal dynamics need to be summarized to increase the understanding and predictability of complex temporal dynamics in ecology and evolution.
Fungi play many essential roles in ecosystems. They facilitate plant access to nutrients and water, serve as decay agents that cycle carbon and nutrients through the soil, water and atmosphere, and are major regulators of macro‐organismal populations. Although technological advances are improving the detection and identification of fungi, there still exist key gaps in our ecological knowledge of this kingdom, especially related to function. Trait‐based approaches have been instrumental in strengthening our understanding of plant functional ecology and, as such, provide excellent models for deepening our understanding of fungal functional ecology in ways that complement insights gained from traditional and ‐omics‐based techniques. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge of fungal functional ecology, taxonomy and systematics and introduce a novel database of fungal functional traits (FunFun). FunFun is built to interface with other databases to explore and predict how fungal functional diversity varies by taxonomy, guild, and other evolutionary or ecological grouping variables. To highlight how a quantitative trait‐based approach can provide new insights, we describe multiple targeted examples and end by suggesting next steps in the rapidly growing field of fungal functional ecology.
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