Guy Woodward

Biodiversity loss threatens ecosystem services on which humanity depends, yet the strength, form and context-dependency of biodiversity–ecosystem service and biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships remain poorly quantified. Here we synthesize 423 studies to determine how biodiversity affects ecosystem functioning and service delivery. We show that regulating services, including water quality and pollination, often exhibit linear relationships, suggesting an additive role for diversity. While biodiversity enhances most functions and services, our effect-size analysis shows that oceanic ‘blue carbon’ sequestration is exceptionally sensitive, revealing how critical marine biodiversity is for climate mitigation. Conversely, services such as hazard regulation appear relatively insensitive to biodiversity, instead depending on a few functionally unique foundational species whose persistence nonetheless is interdependent on the wider community. Our new synthesis enables the forecasting of impacts, for example, that biodiversity loss will reduce pest regulation in countries experiencing population growth and intensive development, and it also highlights how ecosystem services might be used to anticipate future problems.

Approximately half of all methane (CH ₄ ) emissions come from freshwaters, where they are regulated by the microbial ‘CH ₄ filter’ whose efficiency describes the fraction of CH ₄ produced that is subsequently oxidized back to CO ₂ (methanotrophy) before emission. How the CH ₄ filter efficiency responds to natural warming over centuries or millennia remains unknown. Here we address this question using a natural experiment comprising high-latitude, geothermally warmed streams in five regions spanning the Northern Hemisphere. CH ₄ production becomes more efficient with warming, linked to increased abundance of methanogens and underpinned by community shifts. In contrast, while CH ₄ oxidation activity increases, its process-level efficiency does not, and methanotrophs shift towards less efficient taxa. Consequently, the system-level CH ₄ filter efficiency remains fixed, and CH ₄ emissions increase. If this fixed CH ₄ filter efficiency under warming is common to freshwaters worldwide (wetlands, lakes and rivers), then an upward trajectory for CH ₄ emissions through future climate change appears inevitable.

Global change is reshaping the distribution of biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems. Predicting the long‐term consequences of such changes remains a challenge due to a need for a clear understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ecosystem‐level responses, as well as the role of geographical and environmental contingencies. We propose that these gaps can be addressed for freshwater ecosystems using a globally distributed experiment with standardized observations and disturbances. Specifically, this paper outlines the structure of PondNet – a globally distributed network of pond mesocosm experiments – designed to investigate how aquatic food webs respond to environmental change across broad geographical gradients. Pond mesocosms are affordable, low maintenance and easily replicated model ecosystems, with broadly predictable trophic architectures and community size‐structure. PondNet would implement state‐of‐the‐art environmental DNA biodiversity assessments for standardized taxonomic identification across biogeographical regions. A major operational bottleneck for developing a global understanding of environmental change effects on ecosystem functioning is the current lack of standardized experiments across coordinated infrastructures. We propose that by building on existing distributed experiments, we can assemble a modular participation scheme that ensures broad biogeographical coverage whilst accounting for varying levels of resource commitments from local hosts. PondNet aims to answer two overarching questions: 1) how general are community, food web and ecosystem‐level responses to climate change across scales (i.e. local environmental gradients to biogeographical regions)?, and 2) to what extent are such responses contingent on local climate, environment, and regional species pools? PondNet will contribute to developing predictive models that can be adaptively improved from testing with data from globally replicated experiments and monitoring programmes.

Glaciers cover ~10% of Earth’s land surface, and their meltwater rivers are home to diverse biological communities that play central roles maintaining water quality, supporting fisheries, and subsidising the diet of terrestrial birds and mammals1,2. However, current unprecedented rates of glacier shrinkage3 are expected to cause major changes to algae and invertebrate biodiversity in rivers worldwide with largely unknown consequences4,5. Whilst knowledge of co-dependencies among biological groups is critical for predicting biodiversity change and driving conservation actions6, the intricate species-interactions shaping glacial-river food webs remain poorly understood4. Here we use >3500 newly observed feeding interactions among diatoms and invertebrates from rivers in the European Alps to demonstrate how decreasing glacier influence leads to increases in food web size as habitats become warmer, more stable, and less turbid. These responses are consistent with mountain-river biomonitoring observations from a new global meta-analysis of >190 studies. With decreasing glacier influence, diatoms became more species-rich and abundant both in real terms and relative to invertebrate consumers, and mean trophic level declined implying more efficient primary production transfer to consumers. We show this reorganisation is predictable from constituent species’ body mass and abundance, allowing projections to be made for rivers where species interactions remain unstudied. By demonstrating predictable links between species composition, traits, food web structure, and shrinking glaciers, this study significantly advances our ability to forecast ecological responses in rapidly changing mountain environments.

Biodiversity loss threatens the ecosystem services on which humanity depends, yet the functional forms and context-dependency of biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships remain poorly quantified. Here, we analyse an unprecedentedly large biodiversity-ecosystem service compilation, comprising 423 studies, to determine how biodiversity affects ecosystem service delivery. We show that regulating services such as water quality and pollination often exhibit linear relationships, suggesting an additive role for diversity. While biodiversity enhances most services, our effect-size analysis shows that oceanic ‘blue carbon’ sequestration is exceptionally sensitive, revealing how critical marine biodiversity is for climate mitigation. Conversely, services like hazard regulation appear relatively insensitive to biodiversity, instead depending on a few functionally unique foundational species whose persistence nonetheless is interdependent on the wider community. Our new synthesis enables the forecasting of impacts and highlights how ecosystem services might be used to address future problems ahead of time. For instance, we forecast that biodiversity loss will reduce food security in countries experiencing population growth and intensive development, due to a loss of natural protection from pests. Our findings provide the largest global synthesis of BES relationships to date, offering a novel quantitative framework that integrates empirical synthesis with predictive modelling and provides mechanistic insight and actionable guidance.

The threat of climate change has renewed interest in the responses of communities and ecosystems to warming, with changes in size spectra expected to signify fundamental shifts in the structure and dynamics of these multispecies systems. While substantial empirical evidence has accumulated in recent years on such changes, we still lack general insights due to a limited coverage of warming scenarios that span spatial and temporal scales of relevance to natural systems. We addressed this gap by conducting an extensive freshwater mesocosm experiment across 36 large field mesocosms exposed to intergenerational warming treatments of up to +8 °C above ambient levels. We found a nonlinear decrease in the overall mean body size of zooplankton with warming, with a 57% reduction at +8 °C. This pattern was broadly consistent over two tested seasons and major taxonomic groups. We also detected some breakpoints in the community-level size-temperature relationship, indicating that the system’s response shifts noticeably above a certain level of warming. These results underscore the need to capture intergenerational responses to large gradients in warming at appropriate scales in time and space in order to better understand the effects of warming on natural communities and ecosystems.

Warming can have profound impacts on ecological communities. However, explorations of how differences in biogeography and productivity might reshape the effect of warming have been limited to theoretical or proxy-based approaches: for instance, studies of latitudinal temperature gradients are often conflated with other drivers (e.g., species richness). Here, we overcome these limitations by using local geothermal temperature gradients across multiple high-latitude stream ecosystems. Each suite of streams (6-11 warmed by 1-15°C above ambient) is set within one of five regions (37 streams total); because the heating comes from the bedrock and is not confounded by changes in chemistry, we can isolate the effect of temperature. We found a negative overall relationship between diatom and invertebrate species richness and temperature, but the strength of the relationship varied regionally, declining more strongly in regions with low terrestrial productivity. Total invertebrate biomass increased with temperature in all regions. The latter pattern combined with the former suggests that the increased biomass of tolerant species might compensate for the loss of sensitive species. Our results show that the impact of warming can be dependent on regional conditions, demonstrating that local variation should be included in future climate projections rather than simply assuming universal relationships.

Metabolism, the biological processing of energy and materials, scales predictably with temperature and body size. Temperature effects on metabolism are normally studied via acute exposures, which overlooks the capacity for organisms to moderate their metabolism following chronic exposure to warming. Here, we conduct respirometry assays in situ and after transplanting salmonid fish among different streams to disentangle the effects of chronic and acute thermal exposure. We find a clear temperature dependence of metabolism for the transplants, but not the in-situ assays, indicating that chronic exposure to warming can attenuate salmonid thermal sensitivity. A bioenergetic model accurately captures the presence of fish in warmer streams when accounting for chronic exposure, whereas it incorrectly predicts their local extinction with warming when incorporating the acute temperature dependence of metabolism. This highlights the need to incorporate the potential for thermal acclimation or adaptation when forecasting the consequences of global warming on ecosystems.

Warming alters ecosystems through direct physiological effects on organisms and indirect effects via biotic interactions, but their relative impacts in the wild are unknown due to the difficulty in warming natural environments. Here we bridge this gap by embedding manipulative field experiments within a natural stream temperature gradient to test whether warming and apex fish predators have interactive effects on freshwater ecosystems. Fish exerted cascading effects on algal production and microbial decomposition via both green and brown pathways in the food web, but only under warming. Neither temperature nor the presence of fish altered food web structure alone, but connectance and mean trophic level declined as consumer species were lost when both drivers acted together. A mechanistic model indicates that this temperature-induced trophic cascade is determined primarily by altered interactions, which cautions against extrapolating the impacts of warming from reductionist approaches that do not consider the wider food web.

There has been limited characterisation of bat-borne coronaviruses in Europe. Here, we screened for coronaviruses in 48 faecal samples from 16 of the 17 bat species breeding in the UK, collected through a bat rehabilitation and conservationist network. We recovered nine complete genomes, including two novel coronavirus species, across six bat species: four alphacoronaviruses, a MERS-related betacoronavirus, and four closely related sarbecoviruses. We demonstrate that at least one of these sarbecoviruses can bind and use the human ACE2 receptor for infecting human cells, albeit suboptimally. Additionally, the spike proteins of these sarbecoviruses possess an R-A-K-Q motif, which lies only one nucleotide mutation away from a furin cleavage site (FCS) that enhances infectivity in other coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. However, mutating this motif to an FCS does not enable spike cleavage. Overall, while UK sarbecoviruses would require further molecular adaptations to infect humans, their zoonotic risk warrants closer surveillance.