Land-use effects on the plant and animal elementome in grasslands and forests

Increasing land-use intensity has been shown to alter the taxonomic and functional trait diversity and composition of plant and animal communities. Recent synthesis work from the Biodiversity Exploratories has demonstrated that land-use intensification drives synchronous responses of entire multitrophic communities. These responses involve a shift in functional composition from large, slow-growing organisms to smaller, fast-resource-use organisms across trophic levels. Yet, functional traits of different trophic levels have not been mapped into a common economic spectrum based on their traits, mainly due to the lack of a universal cross-taxon functional trait concept. Placing plants and animals into a shared quantitative trait space would enhance our understanding of how community diversity and composition shift along environmental gradients. We propose that the elemental composition (elementome) of organisms can serve as a universal trait set, as stoichiometry has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding ecological systems. For instance, the fast-slow continuum in life-history strategies leaves a distinct signature in the elementome of plants and animals, with fast-growing species typically exhibiting lower C:nutrient ratios. By bridging plant and animal trait perspectives, Elementary will provide novel insights into ecological processes mediated by the elementome and reveal the mechanistic drivers of ecosystem function loss, such as declines in productivity, herbivory, and nutrient fluxes across trophic levels, under land-use change.