Synthesizing fifteen years of research on climate change impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across a boreal landscape

Climate change impacts biodiversity and ecosystem functioning by altering plant, animal and microbial distributions, composition, and food webs, as well as affecting complex interactions and feedback between organisms and functional groups. Most climate change studies to date explore single focus on the response of single or few species, functional groups, trophic levels, or ecosystem characteristics and do not capture the interplay between the key trophic levels and functional groups in the plant-soil food web. This knowledge gap limits our ability to both scale up to a general understanding of climate effects on entire ecosystems, and to predict future responses of climate change. MultiFun exploit a unique opportunity by harnessing and combining, for the first time, data from fifteen years of observational and experimental research on climate change impacts on plant, microbial, and mesofauna performance, populations, communities, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning using an ecosystem multifunctionality approach, a novel analytical framework that explicitly enables assessing multiple ecosystem functions and services simultaneously.