Ricerc@Sapienza

Plants acting as ecosystem engineers create habitats and facilitate biodiversity maintenance within plant communities. Furthermore, biodiversity research has demonstrated that plant diversity enhances the productivity and functioning of ecosystems. However, these two fields of research developed in parallel and independent from one another, with the consequence that little is known about the role of ecosystem engineers in the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across trophic levels. Here, we present an experimental framework to study this relationship.

Conservation organisations and governments often use charismatic megafauna as surrogates to represent broader biodiversity. While these species are primarily selected as “flagships” for marketing campaigns, it is important to evaluate their surrogacy potential, i.e. the extent to which their protection benefits other biodiversity elements.

A large number of diversity metrics are available to study and monitor biodiversity, and their responses to biodiversity changes are not necessarily coherent with each other. The choice of biodiversity metrics may thus strongly affect our interpretation of biodiversity change and, hence, prioritization of resources for conservation. Therefore it is crucial to understand which metrics respond to certain changes, are the most sensitive to change, show consistent responses across different communities, detect early signals of species decline, and are insensitive to demographic stochasticity.

Aims Vegetation-plot records provide information on the presence and cover or abundance of plants co-occurring in the same community. Vegetation-plot data are spread across research groups, environmental agencies and biodiversity research centers and, thus, are rarely accessible at continental or global scales. Here we present the sPlot database, which collates vegetation plots worldwide to allow for the exploration of global patterns in taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity at the plant community level.

The increasing use of phylogenetic methods in community ecology recognizes that accumulated evolutionary differences
among species mirror, to some extent, ecological processes. The scope of this work is thus to propose a new method for the
measurement of community-level phylogenetic redundancy, which takes into account the branching pattern of the underlying
phylogeny. Like for functional redundancy, a measure of phylogenetic redundancy can be described as a normalized

An enormous number of measures based on different criteria have been proposed to quantify evenness or unevenness among species relative abundances in an assemblage. However, a unified approach that can encompass most of the widely used indices is still lacking. Here, we first present some basic requirements for an evenness measure.

Measures of phylogenetic diversity have two main objectives: first disentangling the processes that drive species assemblages and second defining priorities of conservation while considering how much each species might contribute to biodiversity. A now widely used approach for measuring phylogenetic diversity consists in summing branch lengths on phylogenetic trees.