Selected publications

The authors commented on a study (van Klink et al. 2020) on trends in insect biomass and abundance, and argue why they consider the data collected for freshwater to be non-representative and why the results shown there should not be considered indicative of an overall improvement in the condition of freshwater ecosystems.

The authors compared 2 approaches to monitor mosquitoes in Germany: professional trapping vs citizen science. They show that these approaches are complementary. While systematically placed traps allow to better map mosquito diversity, the citizen-science approach of the Mückenatlas project allows to easily detect invasive species and provides otherwise unavailable data from private premises.

This study investigated whether the microbial degradation of more refractory organic matter (OM) is stimulated by the addition of well available OM from dead zooplankton. A significantly higher respiration was measured when zooplankton-derived OM was added to ratio of 1:1. Stimulation was stronger in a complex microbial community with eukaryotes than just bacteria. 

A mosquito monitoring programme was initiated in Germany in 2011, which has been complemented by the citizen science project ‘Mückenatlas’ since 2012. The authors analysed the Mückenatlas dataset to investigate causes of variation in submission numbers and to reveal biases induced by opportunistic data collection.

The vertical flux of marine snow reduces atmospheric CO2. In particular, particle associated prokaryotes are responsible for organic C-loss. Analysis of prokaryotic heterotrophic production a. species richness in the North Atlantic reveal that C- loss a. associated microbial richness are different with particle fractions. Especially large, fast-sinking particles drive C-flux a. -sequestration.

The authors developed a new, probability-based formalism for modeling species distribution.The Network-based Probabilistic Connectivity (NPC) can provide predictions about the distribution and persistence of species at different time scales, and their dependence on patch distribution and patch density in the landscape.

The authors call the attention of researchers and policy makers to two immediate steps: acknowledge the conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation in future policies; and explore socioeconomic trajectories beyond economic growth in the next generation of biodiversity scenarios.

Scientists warn of increasing threats posed by invasive alien species. More effort is needed to prevent, detect and control invasive alien species – this is emphasized by researchers from 13 countries.