Publications

Nielja Knecht, Romi Amilia Lotcheris, Ingo Fetzer, Juan Rocha. 2025. Complex Realities, Simple Signals? Global Evaluation of Early Warning Signals for Forest Mortality Events. EGUsphere. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4902

Forests around the world are increasingly experiencing large-scale regional mortality events as a result of droughts and heat waves. Despite their considerable impacts on the material, non-material, and regulatory contributions of forest ecosystems to people, these mortality events remain difficult to predict. Temporal Early Warning Signals (EWS) based on the concept of Critical Slowing Down (CSD) have been applied widely to r...

Nielja Knecht, Romi Lotcheris, Ingo Fetzer, Juan Rocha. 2025. Limitations of early warning signals: evaluating the performance of resilience loss detection methods to predict forest die-back events from remote sensing data. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18547

Terrestrial ecosystems worldwide are under increasing stress due to changing climate and weather regimes, as well as direct anthropogenic influences such as land use changes. The combination of stressors can erode an ecosystem’s ability to resist and recover from external shocks and pressures. Vegetation resilience loss is often assessed by applying temporal early warning signals (EWS) based on dynamical systems theory to rem...

Fabio Benedetti, Jonas Wydler, Corentin Clerc, Nielja Knecht, Meike Vogt. 2025. Emergent Relationships Between the Functional Diversity of Marine Planktonic Copepods and Ecosystem Functioning in the Global Ocean. Global Change Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70094

Copepods are a major group of the mesozooplankton and thus a key part of marine ecosystems worldwide. Their fitness and life strategies are determined by their functional traits which allow different species to exploit various ecological niches. The range of functional traits expressed in a community defines its functional diversity (FD), which can be used to investigate how communities utilize resources and shape ecosystem pr...

André Pinto da Silva, Nielja Knecht, Romain Thomas, Romi Lotcheris, Beatrice Crona, Juan Rocha. 2025. Challenges and opportunities when assessing exposure of financial investments to ecosystem regime shifts. EcoevoRxiv. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2X335

Financial investments will be affected by ecological regime shifts through the loss of natural resources underpinning dependencies of most economic sectors. We suggest one possible pathway to link industry and products to the likelihood of ecological regime shifts. The challenges and opportunities are discussed at each step, including datasets, methods and metrics. To this end, we identify recent large-scale, state-of-the-art ...

Nielja Knecht, Ingo Fetzer, Juan Rocha. 2024. Global terrestrial ecosystem resilience: a high-resolution multivariate analysis of patterns and drivers. EGU. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-12856

Global assessments of ecosystem resilience often exclude areas with direct anthropogenic land use changes and focus instead on remnant natural ecosystems. However, for regional stakeholders it is important to understand how land-use and zoning decisions may affect the resilience of remaining ecosystems and the risk of critical transitions. In this study, we conduct a high-resolution global assessment of terrestrial ecosystem r...

Corentin Clerc, Laurent Bopp, Fabio Benedetti, Nielja S. Knecht, Meike Vogt, Olivier Aumont. 2024. Effects of mesozooplankton growth and reproduction on plankton and organic carbon dynamics in a marine biogeochemical model. ESS. https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.170983160.00886471/v1

Marine mesozooplankton play an important role for marine ecosystem functioning and global biogeochemical cycles. Their size structure, varying spatially and temporally, heavily impacts biogeochemical processes and ecosystem services. Mesozooplankton exhibit size changes throughout their life cycle, affecting metabolic rates and functional traits. Despite this variability, many models oversimplify mesozooplankton as a single, u...

D. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, N. Knecht, J.C. Llopis, R.A. Heriarivo, H. Rakotoarison, V. Andriamampionomanjaka, E. Navarro-Jurado, V. Randriamamonjy. 2024. Socioeconomic impacts of small conserved sites on rural communities in Madagascar. Environmental Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2024.100965

Madagascar is considered one of the top global biodiversity hotspots while at the same time is among the world's least developed countries. Pressing socioeconomic needs such as food provision often lead to unsustainable land uses and widespread loss, fragmentation and degradation of natural habitats. Thus, ascertaining the socioeconomic effects of small conserved sites is urgent in order to show their benefits and identify the...

Nielja S. Knecht, Fabio Benedetti, Urs Hofmann, nina Bednaršek, Sonia Chaabane, Catharina de Weerd, Katja Peijnenburg, Ralf Schiebel, Meike Vogt. 2023. The impact of zooplankton calcifiers on the marine carbon cycle. ESS. https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.167283650.05543210/v1

Shelled pteropods and planktic foraminifers are calcifying zooplankton that contribute to the biological carbon pump, but their importance for regional and global plankton biomass and carbon fluxes is not well understood. Here, we modelled global annual patterns of pteropod and foraminifer total carbon (TC) biomass and total inorganic carbon (TIC) export fluxes over the top 200m using an ensemble of five species distribution m...