Biology subjects

Buitenwerf, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Buitenwerf, R..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Nutrient enrichment and herbivore exclusion disrupt the climate-driven balance between C3 and C4 plants in grasslands

The distribution of plants with different photosynthetic pathways is strongly structured by climate, with C3 plants favoured in cooler temperate regions and C4 plants in hotter, high-light conditions. The relative abundance of C3 and C4 plants across the world has cascading impacts on local food webs, decomposition, productivity and other vital ecosystem processes. Human impacts, including climate change, changes to herbivore assemblages, and increased nutrient availability, are shifting the optimal conditions for important C3 and C4-dominated ecosystems and crops. Using 3,184 plot-level observations from 112 sites across six continents, we reveal how chronic nutrient enrichment disrupts the climate-driven balance between C3 and C4 plants in grasslands. We found that, consistent with expectations, the global distribution of C4 plants was strongly related to climate. However, experimental nutrient addition reduced the relative cover of C4 species, with the strongest declines found when nitrogen and phosphorus were added together. Herbivore exclusion had no consistent effect on C4 plants. Our results provide global experimental evidence that elevated nutrients, particularly nitrogen, alter competitive outcomes among plant functional types to suppress C4 grasses, even in climatically optimal conditions. This has major implications for predicting vegetation responses to global change, with consequences for carbon cycling, primary productivity, herbivore dynamics, and food security.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

TOWARDS CLIMATE-SMART REWILDING: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR BIODIVERSITY, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND SOCIETY

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework aim to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems. Both the IPCC and IPBES highlight the crucial role of ecosystem restoration in addressing the interconnected crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. One key restoration strategy is rewilding, which enhances ecosystem complexity with minimal human intervention. While traditional rewilding strategies often focus on benefits for biodiversity, we propose a climate-smart rewilding framework as a new approach designed to deliver climate benefits alongside biodiversity restoration. This framework seeks to integrate biodiversity, climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as socio-economic benefits and trade-offs. We illustrate how this framework can be utilized to identify areas across Europe where rewilding could increase carbon sequestration, enhance species abilities to adapt to the velocity of climate change, and maximize wildlife-watching benefits while minimizing the costs associated with livestock-wildlife conflict. Finally, we acknowledge some limitations of climate-smart rewilding, but we argue that its adaptability and low cost render it a promising solution to the challenges facing Europe and beyond.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Identifying the potential for sustainable human wildlife coexistence by integrating willingness to coexist with habitat suitability models

Persistence of large mammals in the Anthropocene depends on human willingness to coexist with them, but this is rarely incorporated into habitat suitability or conservation priority assessments. We propose a framework that integrates human willingness-to-coexist with habitat suitability assessments to identify areas of high potential for sustainable coexistence. We demonstrate its applicability for elephants and rhinos in the socio-ecological system of Maasai Mara, Kenya, by integrating spatial distributions of peoples willingness-to-coexist based on Bayesian hierarchical models using 556 household interviews, with socio-ecological habitat suitability mapping validated with long-term elephant observations from aerial surveys. Willingness-to-coexist was higher if people had little personal experience with a species, and strongly reduced by experiencing a species as a threat to humans. The sustainable coexistence potential framework highlights areas of low socio-ecological suitability, and areas that require more effort to increase positive stakeholder engagement to achieve long-term persistence of large herbivores in human-dominated landscapes.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Recent global changes have decoupled species richness from specialization patterns in North American birds

AimTheory suggests that increasing productivity and climate stability toward the tropics can explain the latitudinal richness gradient by favouring specialization. A positive relationship between species richness and specialization should thus emerge as a fundamental biogeographic pattern. However, land use and climate change disproportionally increase the local extirpation risk for specialists, potentially impacting this pattern. Here, we empirically quantify the richness-specialization prediction and test how 50 years of climate and land use change has affected the richness-specialization relationship.\n\nLocation\n\nUSA\n\nTime period\n\n1966-2015\n\nMajor taxa studied\n\nBirds\n\nMethodsWe used the North American breeding bird survey to quantify bird community richness and specialization to habitat and climate. We assess i) temporal change in the slope of the richness-specialization relationship, using a Generalized Mixed Model; ii) temporal change in spatial covariation of richness and specialization as driven by local environmental conditions, using Generalized Additive Models; and iii) land use, climate and topographic drivers of the spatio-temporal changes in the relationship, using a multivariate method.\n\nResultsWe found evidence for a positive richness-specialization relationship in bird communities. However, the slope of the relationship declined strongly over time. Richness spatially covaried with specialization following a unimodal pattern. The peak of the unimodal pattern shifted toward less specialized communities over time. These temporal changes were associated with precipitation change, decreasing temperature stability and land use.\n\nMain conclusionsRecent climate and land use changes induced two antagonist types of community responses. In human-dominated areas, the decoupling of richness and specialization drove a general biotic homogenization trend. In human-preserved areas under increasing climate harshness, specialization increased while richness decreased in a \"specialization\" trend. Our results offer new support for specialization as a key driver of macroecological diversity patterns, and show that global changes are erasing this fundamental macroecological pattern.\n\nBiosketchAnne Mimet is a postdoctoral researcher interested in the understanding of human impacts on biodiversity through land use and climate changes, at various spatio-temporal scales. She is interested in embracing the complexity of socio-ecological systems, and in the understanding of biodiversity trends in a human-dominated world in the context of the general theories of ecology.

ecology↗