Publications

Steffen, W., Rockström, J., Richardson, K., Lenton, T.M. et.al. 2018. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. PNAS August 14, 2018 115 (33) 8252-8259. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1810141115

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years a...

Wang-Erlandsson, L., I. Fetzer, P.W. Keys, R.J. van der Ent, H.H.G. Savenije, L.J. Gordon. 2018. Remote land use impacts on river flows through atmospheric teleconnections. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions doi:10.5194/hess-2017-494.

The effects of land-use change on river flows have usually been explained by changes within a river basin. However, land-atmosphere feedback such as moisture recycling can link local land-use change to modifications of remote precipitation, with further knock-on effects on distant river flows. Here, we look at river flow changes caused by both land-use change and water use within the basin, as well as modifications of imported...

Lade, S. J., Donges, J. F., Fetzer, I., Anderies, J. M., Beer, C., Cornell, S. E., Gasser, T., Norberg, J., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., and Steffen, W. 2018. Analytically tractable climate–carbon cycle feedbacks under 21st century anthropogenic forcing, Earth Syst. Dynam., 9, 507-523, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-507-2018, 2018.

Changes to climate–carbon cycle feedbacks may significantly affect the Earth system’s response to greenhouse gas emissions. These feedbacks are usually analysed from numerical output of complex and arguably opaque Earth system models. Here, we construct a stylised global climate–carbon cycle model, test its output against comprehensive Earth system models, and investigate the strengths of its climate–carbon cycle feedbacks ...

Saleem, M., I. Fetzer, H. Harms, A. Chatzinotas. 2016. Trophic complexity in aqueous systems: Bacterial species richness and protistan predation regulate dissolved organic carbon and dissolved total nitrogen removal. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 283(1825): 20152724.

Loading of water bodies with dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and dissolved total nitrogen (DTN) affects their integrity and functioning. Microbial interactions mitigate the negative effects of high nutrient loads in these ecosystems. Despite numerous studies on how biodiversity mediates ecosystem functions, whether and how diversity and complexity of microbial food webs (horizontal, vertical) and the underlying ecological mecha...

Stolpovsky, K., I. Fetzer, P. Van Cappellen, M. Thullner. 2016. Influence of dormancy on microbial competition under intermittent substrate supply: Insights from model simulations. FEMS Microbiology Ecology 92: 1 – 10

Most natural environments are characterized by frequent changes of their abiotic conditions. Microorganisms can respond to such changes by switching their physiological state between activity and dormancy allowing them to endure periods of unfavorable abiotic conditions. As a consequence, the competitiveness of microbial species is not simply determined by their growth performance under favorable conditions but also by their a...

Richter, S., I. Fetzer, M. Thullner, F. Centler, P. Dittrich. 2015. Towards rule-based metabolic databases: A requirement analysis based on KEGG. International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics 13: 289–319.

Knowledge of metabolic processes is collected in easily accessible online databases which are increasing rapidly in content and detail. Using these databases for the automatic construction of metabolic network models requires high accuracy and consistency. In this bipartite study we evaluate current accuracy and consistency problems using the KEGG database as a prominent example and propose design principles for dealing with s...

Steffen, W., K. Richardson, J. Rockström, S.E. Cornell, I. Fetzer, E.M. Bennett, R. Biggs, S.R. Carpenter, W. De Vries, C.A. De Wit, C. Folke, D. Gerten, J. Heinke, G.M. Mace, L.M. Persson, V. Ramanathan, B. Reyers, S. Sörlin. 2015. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347: 736, 1259855

The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity based on the intrinsic biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system. Here, we revise and update the planetary boundary framework, with a focus on the underpinning biophysical science, based on targeted input from expert research communities and on more general scientific advances over the past 5 years. Several of the boundar...

Lucas, R., A. Kuchenbuch, I. Fetzer, H. Harms, S. Kleinsteuber. 2015. Long-term monitoring reveals stable and remarkably similar microbial communities in parallel full-scale biogas reactors digesting energy crops. FEMS Microbiology Ecology 91(3) DOI: 10.1093/femsec/fiv004

Biogas is an important renewable energy carrier. It is a product of stepwise anaerobic degradation of organic materials by highly diverse microbial communities forming complex interlinking metabolic networks. Knowledge about the microbial background of long-term stable process performance in full-scale reactors is crucial for rationally improving the efficiency and reliability of biogas plants. To generate such knowledge, in...

Glaser, K., A. Kuppardt, J. Boenigk, H. Harms, I. Fetzer, A. Chatzinotas. 2015. The influence of environmental factors on protistan microorganisms in grassland soils along a land-use gradient. Science of the Total Environment 537: 33–42

In this study, we investigated the effect of land use intensity, soil parameters and vegetation on protistan communities in grassland soils. We performed qualitative (T-RFLP) and quantitative (qPCR) analyses using primers specifically targeting the 18S rRNA gene for all Eukarya and for two common flagellate groups, i.e. the Chrysophyceae and the Kinetoplastea. Both approaches were applied to extracted soil DNA and RNA, in or...

Fetzer, I., K. Johst, R. Schawea, T. Banitz, H. Harms, A. Chatzinotas. 2015. The extent of functional redundancy changes as species’ roles shift in different environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 112: 14888–14893

Assessing the ecological impacts of environmental change requires knowledge of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The exact nature of this relationship can differ considerably between ecosystems, with consequences for the efficacy of species diversity as a buffer against environmental change. Using a microbial model system, we show that the relationship can vary depending on environmental conditio...