Direct and biodiversity-mediated effects of land use intensity on ecosystem resilience

Many disturbances affect our natural ecosystems, including climate and land use changes. But what drives their resilience? We found that biodiversity is key for the resilience of temperate grasslands and this is so independently of how intensively used such grasslands were. Intensively used grasslands are most resilient, so you become stronger when you have little to lose. The experiments from the Exploratories consortium help investigating how grasslands and forests under different management regimes respond to further disturbances and this platform will hopefully help others understand the (a)biotic drivers of ecosystem resilience to multiple global change drivers.