Shan Luo

University of Liverpool | UoL

Decades of studies have demonstrated links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, yet the generality of the relationships and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear, especially for forest ecosystems. Using 11 tree‐diversity experiments, we tested tree species richness–community productivity relationships and the role of arbuscular (AM) o...

Decades of theory and empirical studies have demonstrated links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, yet the putative processes that underlie these patterns remain elusive. This is especially true for forest ecosystems, where the functional traits of plant species are challenging to quantify. We analyzed 74,563 forest inventory plots tha...

Tree species are known to predominantly interact either with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) or ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi. However, there is a knowledge gap regarding whether these mycorrhizae differently influence biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships and whether a combination of both can increase community productivity. In 2015, we...

Soil microorganisms are major regulators of ecosystem functioning and are under threat from human-induced disturbances. Among these threats is grassland degradation, which is estimated to affect 49% of the grassland area worldwide, threatening biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Yet, we currently lack an understanding of how grassland degradati...

While most studies yield positive relationships between biodiversity (B) and ecosystem functioning (EF), awareness is growing that BEF relationships can vary with ecological context. The awareness has led to increased efforts to understand how contemporary environmental context modifies BEF relationships, but the role of historical context, and the...

Tree species are known to predominantly interact either with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) or ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi. However, there is a knowledge gap whether these mycorrhizae differently influence biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships and whether a combination of both can increase community productivity. In 2015, we establishe...

Terrestrial ecosystems are under threat by the co-occurring biodiversity loss and nitrogen (N) deposition. Awareness is growing that the stabilizing effects of plant diversity on productivity depend on environmental context, but it remains unknown about how the loss of plant functional groups and N deposition interactively influence species richnes...

Grasslands are under severe threat from ongoing degradation, undermining their capacity to support biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. Yet, grasslands are largely ignored in sustainable development agendas. In this Perspective, we examine the current state of global grasslands and explore the extent and dominant drivers of their...

Aims The importance of density-dependent mortality in maintaining tree species diversity is widely accepted. However, density-dependent effects may vary in magnitude and direction with different abiotic conditions in forests. Theoretical predictions surmise that density-dependent effects may vary with soil available nitrogen (AN), but this still ne...

The structure of a plant community in terms of functional traits can strongly affect community productivity. Two components may contribute to this, community-wide trait means (mass-ratio hypothesis) or community-wide trait variations (diversity hypothesis) across species and individuals. We compared the explanatory power of the two hypotheses for e...

The relationship between plant diversity and productivity and the mechanisms underpinning that relationship remain poorly resolved in species-rich forests. We combined extensive field observations and experimental manipulations in a subtropical forest to test how species richness (SR) and phylogenetic diversity (PD) interact with putative root-asso...

The effect of biodiversity on primary productivity has been a hot topic in ecology for over 20 years. Biodiversity-productivity relationships in natural ecosystems are highly variable, although positive relationships are most common. Understanding the conditions under which different relationships emerge is still a major challenge. Here, by analyzi...

Historic yield advances in the major crops have to a large part been achieved by selection for improved productivity of groups of plant individuals such as high-density stands. Research suggests that such improved group productivity depends on “cooperative” traits (e.g. erect leaves, short stems) that – while beneficial to the group – decrease indi...

Technologies for crop breeding have become increasingly sophisticated, yet it remains unclear whether these advances are sufficient to meet future demands. A major challenge with current crop selection regimes is that they are often based on individual performance. This tends to select for plants with “selfish” traits, which leads to a yield loss w...

Plant resource partitioning is a mechanism promoting species coexistence and ecosystem functioning. Yet, we still have limited understanding of how soil microbes, especially plant symbiotic microbes, influence resource partitioning. We hypothesized that soil‐borne microbes, in particular mycorrhizal fungi, facilitate differential performance of tre...

Plant community productivity commonly increases with increasing plant diversity, which is explained by complementarity among plant species in resource utilization (complementarity effect), or by selection of particularly productive plant species in diverse plant communities (selection effect). Recent studies have also shown that soil biota can driv...

Negative density-dependent seedling mortality has been widely detected in tropical, subtropical and temperate forests, with soil pathogens as a major driver. Here we investigated how host density affects the composition of soil pathogen communities and consequently influences the strength of plant-soil feedbacks. In field censuses of six 1-ha perma...