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Article
Open AccessBioturbation by Benthic Stingrays Alters the Biogeomorphology of Tidal Flats
Fishing-down-marine-food-webs has resulted in alarming declines of various species worldwide. Benthic rays are one examples of such overexploited species. On tidal flats, these rays are highly abundant and pla...
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Article
Open AccessThe seafloor from a trait perspective. A comprehensive life history dataset of soft sediment macrozoobenthos
Biological trait analysis (BTA) is a valuable tool for evaluating changes in community diversity and its link to ecosystem processes as well as environmental and anthropogenic perturbations. Trait-based analyt...
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Article
Open AccessOntogenetic niche shifts as a driver of seasonal migration
Ontogenetic niche shifts have helped to understand population dynamics. Here we show that ontogenetic niche shifts also offer an explanation, complementary to traditional concepts, as to why certain species sh...
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Article
Open AccessSeagrass Sensitivity to Collapse Along a Hydrodynamic Gradient: Evidence from a Pristine Subtropical Intertidal Ecosystem
Eutrophication causes tremendous losses to seagrass around the globe. The effects of nutrient loading vary along environmental gradients, and wave forces especially are expected to affect meadow stability, nut...
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Article
Change in dominance determines herbivore effects on plant biodiversity
Herbivores alter plant biodiversity (species richness) in many of the world’s ecosystems, but the magnitude and the direction of herbivore effects on biodiversity vary widely within and among ecosystems. One c...
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Open AccessEvidence for ‘critical slowing down’ in seagrass: a stress gradient experiment at the southern limit of its range
The theory of critical slowing down, i.e. the increasing recovery times of complex systems close to tip** points, has been proposed as an early warning signal for collapse. Empirical evidence for the reality...
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Open AccessA facultative mutualistic feedback enhances the stability of tropical intertidal seagrass beds
Marine foundation species such as corals, seagrasses, salt marsh plants, and mangrove trees are increasingly found to engage in mutualistic interactions. Because mutualisms by their very nature generate a posi...
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Open AccessUnexpected dietary preferences of Eurasian Spoonbills in the Dutch Wadden Sea: spoonbills mainly feed on small fish not shrimp
After an historical absence, over the last decades Eurasian Spoonbills Platalea leucorodia leucorodia have returned to breed on the barrier islands of the Wadden Sea. The area offers an abundance of predator-free...
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Article
Open AccessDispersal-competition tradeoff in microbiomes in the quest for land colonization
Ancestor microbes started colonizing inland habitats approximately 2.7 to 3.5 billion years ago. With some exceptions, the key physiological adaptations of microbiomes associated with marine-to-land transition...
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Open AccessGrassland structural heterogeneity in a savanna is driven more by productivity differences than by consumption differences between lawn and bunch grasses
Savanna grasslands are characterized by high spatial heterogeneity in vegetation structure, aboveground biomass and nutritional quality, with high quality short-grass grazing lawns forming mosaics with patches...
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The Importance of Coprophagous Macrodetritivores for the Maintenance of Vegetation Heterogeneity in an African Savannah
Grazing ecosystems are often characterized by dynamic vegetation structure mosaics of short grazing lawns and tall grass vegetation that are important for the biodiversity and functioning of these ecosystems. ...
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Pattern formation at multiple spatial scales drives the resilience of mussel bed ecosystems
Self-organized complexity at multiple spatial scales is a distinctive characteristic of biological systems. Yet, little is known about how different self-organizing processes operating at different spatial sca...
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Mesoherbivores affect grasshopper communities in a megaherbivore-dominated South African savannah
African savannahs are among the few places on earth where diverse communities of mega- and meso-sized ungulate grazers dominate ecosystem functioning. Less conspicuous, but even more diverse, are the communiti...
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Generalities in grazing and browsing ecology: using across-guild comparisons to control contingencies
In community ecology, broad-scale spatial replication can accommodate contingencies in patterns within species groups, but contingencies in processes across species groups remain problematic. Here, based on a ...
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Article
Non-trophic Interactions Control Benthic Producers on Intertidal Flats
The importance of positive effects of ecosystem engineers on associated communities is predicted to increase with environmental stress. However, incorporating such non-trophic interactions into ecological theo...
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Article
Responses of savanna lawn and bunch grasses to water limitation
The grass layer of African savannas consists of two main vegetation types: grazing lawns, dominated by short, mostly clonally reproducing grasses, and bunch grasslands, dominated by tall bunch grasses. This pa...
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Article
Food Web Assembly at the Landscape Scale: Using Stable Isotopes to Reveal Changes in Trophic Structure During Succession
Food webs are increasingly evaluated at the landscape scale, accounting for spatial interactions involving different nutrient and energy channels. Also, while long viewed as static, food webs are increasingly ...
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Article
Herbivore trampling as an alternative pathway for explaining differences in nitrogen mineralization in moist grasslands
Studies addressing the role of large herbivores on nitrogen cycling in grasslands have suggested that the direction of effects depends on soil fertility. Via selection for high quality plant species and input ...
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Open AccessHippopotamus and livestock grazing: influences on riparian vegetation and facilitation of other herbivores in the Mara Region of Kenya
Riparian savanna habitats grazed by hippopotamus or livestock experience seasonal ecological stresses through the depletion of herbaceous vegetation, and are often points of contacts and conflicts between herb...
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Article
Open AccessSeagrass–Sediment Feedback: An Exploration Using a Non-recursive Structural Equation Model
The reciprocal effects between sediment texture and seagrass density are assumed to play an important role in the dynamics and stability of intertidal–coastal ecosystems. However, this feedback relationship ha...
