Abstract:
Land-use and climate change are major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Most of the
current biodiversity monitoring systems are based on periodic records of the populations of a set of
threatened or popular ‘?agship’ indicator species. In contrast to the abundance-based monitoring of
species, also speci?c indicators of processes and functional interactions in an ecosystem may become
targets of a more functional monitoring which can unveil early responses of an ecosystem to environmental changes at different spatial and temporal scales. The contributions of this Special Issue present
such functional indicators for assessing and predicting responses to environmental changes of ecosystem
functions in a hotspot of tropical biodiversity.
