| dc.description.abstract | Human activities have caused biodiversity simplification at local and global scales and raised
concerns about potential effects on ecosystem functions and biodiversity conservation. In the
past decades, there have been increasing efforts to better understand the relationships between
biodiversity (loss) and ecosystem functions, mainly primary productivity, carbon storage, and
temporal stability of productivity. However, there remain important aspects that are still debated
and understudied. Under the ongoing global environmental change, herein, (i) I reviewed and
examined the predictors, drivers and mechanisms of forest background and acute tree mortality
under global environmental change and particularly the interactions between drivers within and
between two mortality modes; (ii) I tested the relationships between multifacet diversity
(functional, phylogenetic and taxonomic) and biomass and stem mortality rates as well as the
underlying mechanisms including biotic damage, stand density index and size inequality in
natural forests, in British Columbia, Canada; (iii) I mechanistically studied the relationship
between multifacet diversity relationship with temporal stability of productivity in natural
temperate and boreal forests across Canada. [...] | en_US |
