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Dive into the research topics where Katharina Gerstner is active.

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Featured researches published by Katharina Gerstner.


Ecology Letters | 2014

Environmental heterogeneity as a universal driver of species richness across taxa, biomes and spatial scales

Anke Stein; Katharina Gerstner; Holger Kreft

Environmental heterogeneity is regarded as one of the most important factors governing species richness gradients. An increase in available niche space, provision of refuges and opportunities for isolation and divergent adaptation are thought to enhance species coexistence, persistence and diversification. However, the extent and generality of positive heterogeneity-richness relationships are still debated. Apart from widespread evidence supporting positive relationships, negative and hump-shaped relationships have also been reported. In a meta-analysis of 1148 data points from 192 studies worldwide, we examine the strength and direction of the relationship between spatial environmental heterogeneity and species richness of terrestrial plants and animals. We find that separate effects of heterogeneity in land cover, vegetation, climate, soil and topography are significantly positive, with vegetation and topographic heterogeneity showing particularly strong associations with species richness. The use of equal-area study units, spatial grain and spatial extent emerge as key factors influencing the strength of heterogeneity-richness relationships, highlighting the pervasive influence of spatial scale in heterogeneity-richness studies. We provide the first quantitative support for the generality of positive heterogeneity-richness relationships across heterogeneity components, habitat types, taxa and spatial scales from landscape to global extents, and identify specific needs for future comparative heterogeneity-richness research.


Regional Environmental Change | 2015

Synthesis in land change science: methodological patterns, challenges, and guidelines

Nicholas R. Magliocca; Thomas Rudel; Peter H. Verburg; William J. McConnell; Ole Mertz; Katharina Gerstner; Andreas Heinimann; Erle C. Ellis

Global and regional economic and environmental changes are increasingly influencing local land-use, livelihoods, and ecosystems. At the same time, cumulative local land changes are driving global and regional changes in biodiversity and the environment. To understand the causes and consequences of these changes, land change science (LCS) draws on a wide array synthetic and meta-study techniques to generate global and regional knowledge from local case studies of land change. Here, we review the characteristics and applications of synthesis methods in LCS and assess the current state of synthetic research based on a meta-analysis of synthesis studies from 1995 to 2012. Publication of synthesis research is accelerating, with a clear trend toward increasingly sophisticated and quantitative methods, including meta-analysis. Detailed trends in synthesis objectives, methods, and land change phenomena and world regions most commonly studied are presented. Significant challenges to successful synthesis research in LCS are also identified, including issues of interpretability and comparability across case-studies and the limits of and biases in the geographic coverage of case studies. Nevertheless, synthesis methods based on local case studies will remain essential for generating systematic global and regional understanding of local land change for the foreseeable future, and multiple opportunities exist to accelerate and enhance the reliability of synthetic LCS research in the future. Demand for global and regional knowledge generation will continue to grow to support adaptation and mitigation policies consistent with both the local realities and regional and global environmental and economic contexts of land change.


Journal of Applied Ecology | 2014

EDITOR'S CHOICE: REVIEW: Effects of land use on plant diversity – A global meta‐analysis

Katharina Gerstner; Carsten F. Dormann; Anke Stein; Ameur M. Manceur; Ralf Seppelt

Summary Plant diversity is globally threatened by anthropogenic land use including management and modification of the natural environment. At regional and local scales, numerous studies world-wide have examined land use and its effects on plant diversity, but evidence for declining species diversity is mixed. This is because, first, land use comes in many variations, hampering comparisons of studies. Second, land use directly affects the environment, but indirect effects extend beyond the boundaries of the land in use. Third, land-use effects greatly depend on the environmental, historical and socio-economic context. To evaluate the generality and variation of studies’ findings about land-use effects, we undertook a quantitative synthesis using meta-analytic techniques. Using 572 effect sizes from 375 studies distributed globally relating to 11 classes of land use, we found that direct and indirect effects of land use on plant diversity (measured as species richness) are variable and can lead to both local decreases and increases. Further, we found evidence (best AIC model) that land-use-specific covariables mostly determine effect-size variation and that in general land-use effects differ between biomes. Synthesis and applications. This extensive synthesis provides the most comprehensive and quantitative overview to date about the effects of the most widespread and relevant land-use options on plant diversity and their covariables. We found important covariables of specific land-use classes but little evidence that land-use effects can be generally explained by their environmental and socio-economic context. We also found a strong regional bias in the number of studies (i.e. more studies from Europe and North America) and highlight the need for an overarching and consistent land-use classification scheme. Thereby, our study provides a new vantage point for future research directions.


Methods in Ecology and Evolution | 2017

Will your paper be used in a meta‐analysis? Make the reach of your research broader and longer lasting

Katharina Gerstner; David Moreno-Mateos; Jessica Gurevitch; Michael Beckmann; Stephan Kambach; Holly P. Jones; Ralf Seppelt

Summary Ecological and evolutionary research increasingly uses quantitative synthesis of primary research studies (meta-analysis) for answering fundamental questions, informing environmental policy and summarizing results for decision makers. Knowing how meta-analysis works is important for researchers so that their research can have broader impact. Meta-analytic thinking encourages scientists to see single primary research studies as substantial contributions to a larger picture. To facilitate inclusion in a meta-analysis, relevant primary research studies must be found and basic information about the methods and results must be thoroughly, clearly and transparently reported. While many published papers provide this information, it is common for essential data to be omitted, leading to study exclusion from meta-analyses. We provide guidelines for correctly reporting basic data needed from primary studies in ecology and evolutionary biology so that they can be included in meta-analyses, together with examples that show how data should be reported to enable calculation and analysis of effect sizes, and how data should be made accessible. These guidelines are important for reporting research results in general, whether or not results are included in subsequent meta-analyses, because they are necessary for the interpretation and assessment of study outcomes. Increased implementation of these guidelines by authors, editors and publishers, and reinforcement by funders, will foster higher quality and more inclusive syntheses, further the goals of transparency and reproducibility in science, and improve the quality and value of primary research studies.


BioScience | 2016

Harmonizing Biodiversity Conservation and Productivity in the Context of Increasing Demands on Landscapes

Ralf Seppelt; Michael Beckmann; Silvia Ceauşu; Anna F. Cord; Katharina Gerstner; Jessica Gurevitch; Stephan Kambach; Stefan Klotz; Chase Mendenhall; Helen Phillips; Kristin Powell; Peter H. Verburg; Willem Verhagen; Marten Winter; Tim Newbold

Abstract Biodiversity conservation and agricultural production are often seen as mutually exclusive objectives. Strategies for reconciling them are intensely debated. We argue that harmonization between biodiversity conservation and crop production can be improved by increasing our understanding of the underlying relationships between them. We provide a general conceptual framework that links biodiversity and agricultural production through the separate relationships between land use and biodiversity and between land use and production. Hypothesized relationships are derived by synthesizing existing empirical and theoretical ecological knowledge. The framework suggests nonlinear relationships caused by the multifaceted impacts of land use (composition, configuration, and intensity). We propose solutions for overcoming the apparently dichotomous aims of maximizing either biodiversity conservation or agricultural production and suggest new hypotheses that emerge from our proposed framework.


Environmental Research Letters | 2016

Why do forest products become less available? A pan-tropical comparison of drivers of forest-resource degradation.

Kathleen Hermans-Neumann; Katharina Gerstner; Ilse R. Geijzendorffer; Martin Herold; Ralf Seppelt; Sven Wunder

Forest products provide an important source of income and wellbeing for rural smallholder communities across the tropics. Although tropical forest products frequently become over-exploited, only few studies explicitly address the dynamics of degradation in response to socio-economic drivers. Our study addresses this gap by analyzing the factors driving changes in tropical forest products in the perception of rural smallholder communities. Using the poverty and environment network global dataset, we studied recently perceived trends of forest product availability considering firewood, charcoal, timber, food, medicine, forage and other forest products. We looked at a pan-tropical sample of 233 villages with forest access. Our results show that 90% of the villages experienced declining availability of forest resources over the last five years according to the informants. Timber and fuelwood together with forest foods were featured as the most strongly affected, though with marked differences across continents. In contrast, availability of at least one main forest product was perceived to increase in only 39% of the villages. Furthermore, the growing local use of forest resources is seen as the main culprit for the decline. In villages with both growing forest resource use and immigration—vividly illustrating demographic pressures—the strongest forest resources degradation was observed. Conversely, villages with little or no population growth and a decreased use of forest resources were most likely to see significant forest-resource increases. Further, villages are less likely to perceive resource declines when local communities own a significant share of forest area. Our results thus suggest that perceived resource declines have only exceptionally triggered adaptations in local resource-use and management patterns that would effectively deal with scarcity. Hence, at the margin this supports neo-Malthusian over neo-Boserupian explanations of local resource-use dynamics.


Ecography | 2017

Agriculture rivals biomes in predicting global species richness

Laura Kehoe; Cornelius Senf; Carsten Meyer; Katharina Gerstner; Holger Kreft; Tobias Kuemmerle

Species-area relationships (SARs) provide an avenue to model patterns of species richness and have recently been shown to vary substantially across regions of different climate, vegetation, and land cover. Given that a large proportion of the globe has been converted to agriculture, and considering the large variety in agricultural management practices, a key question is whether global SARs vary across gradients of agricultural intensity. We developed SARs for mammals that account for geographic variation in biomes, land cover and a range of land-use intensity indicators representing inputs (e.g. fertilizer, irrigation), outputs (e.g. yields) and system-level measures of intensity (e.g. human appropriation of net primary productivity - HANPP). We systematically compared the resulting SARs in terms of their predictive ability. Our global SAR with a universal slope was significantly improved by the inclusion of any one of the three variable types: biomes, land cover, and land-use intensity. The latter, in the form of human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP), performed as well as biomes and land-cover in predicting species richness. Other land-use intensity indicators had a lower predictive ability. Our main finding that land-use intensity performs as well as biomes and land cover in predicting species richness emphasizes that human factors are on a par with environmental factors in predicting global patterns of biodiversity. While our broad-scale study cannot establish causality, human activity is known to drive species richness at a local scale, and our findings suggest that this may hold true at a global scale. The ability of land-use intensity to explain variation in SARs at a global scale had not previously been assessed. Our study suggests that the inclusion of land-use intensity in SAR models allows us to better predict and understand species richness patterns. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.


Journal of Biogeography | 2014

Accounting for geographical variation in species–area relationships improves the prediction of plant species richness at the global scale

Katharina Gerstner; Carsten F. Dormann; Tomáš Václavík; Holger Kreft; Ralf Seppelt


Ecological Monographs | 2018

Model averaging in ecology: a review of Bayesian, information‐theoretic, and tactical approaches for predictive inference

Carsten F. Dormann; Justin M. Calabrese; Gurutzeta Guillera-Arroita; Eleni Matechou; Volker Bahn; Kamil A. Bartoń; Colin M. Beale; Simone Ciuti; Jane Elith; Katharina Gerstner; Jérôme Guélat; Petr Keil; José J. Lahoz-Monfort; Laura J. Pollock; Björn Reineking; David R. Roberts; Boris Schröder; Wilfried Thuiller; David I. Warton; Brendan A. Wintle; Simon N. Wood; Rafael O. Wüest; Florian Hartig


Methods in Ecology and Evolution | 2018

mobsim: An r package for the simulation and measurement of biodiversity across spatial scales

Felix May; Katharina Gerstner; Daniel J. McGlinn; Xiao Xiao; Jonathan M. Chase

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Ralf Seppelt

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

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Holger Kreft

University of Göttingen

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Anke Stein

University of Göttingen

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Michael Beckmann

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

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Tobias Kuemmerle

Humboldt University of Berlin

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Tomáš Václavík

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

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Ameur M. Manceur

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

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