One Sentence Summary: Empirical evidence from grasslands around the world demonstrates a humped-back relationship between plant species richness and biomass at the 1 m 2 plot scale.Abstract: One of the central problems of ecology is the prediction of species diversity. The humped-back model (HBM) suggests that plant diversity is highest at intermediate levels of productivity; at low productivity few species can tolerate the environmental stresses and at high productivity a small number of highly competitive species dominate. A recent study claims to have comprehensively refuted the HBM. Here we show, using the largest, most geographically diverse dataset ever compiled and specifically built for testing this model that if the conditions are met, namely a wide range in biomass at the 1 m 2 plot level and the inclusion of plant litter, the relationship between plant biomass and species richness is hump shaped, supporting the HBM. Our findings shed new light on the prediction of plant diversity in grasslands, which is crucial for supporting management practices for effective conservation of biodiversity. 4Main Text: The relationship between plant diversity and productivity is a topic of intense debate (1-6). The HBM states that plant species richness peaks at intermediate productivity, taking above-ground biomass as a proxy for annual net primary productivity (ANPP) (7-9). This diversity peak is driven by two opposing processes; in unproductive and disturbed ecosystems where there is low plant biomass, species richness is limited by either stress, such as insufficient water and mineral nutrients, or high levels of disturbance-induced removal of biomass, which few species are able to tolerate. In contrast, in the low disturbance and productive conditions that generate high plant biomass it is competitive exclusion by a small number of highly competitive species that is hypothesized to constrain species richness (7-9). Other mechanisms proposed to explain the unimodal relationship between species richness and productivity include disturbance (10), evolutionary history and dispersal limitation (11,12), and density limitation affected by plant size (13).Different case studies have supported or rejected the HBM, and three separate meta-analyses reached different conclusions (14). This inconsistency may indicate a lack of generality of the HBM, or it may reflect a sensitivity to study characteristics including the type(s) of plant communities considered, the taxonomic scope, the length of the gradient sampled, the spatial grain and extent of analyses (14,15), and the particular measure of net primary productivity (16). Although others would argue (6), we maintain that the question remains whether the HBM serves as a useful and general model for grassland ecosystem theory and management. 5 We quantified the form and strength of the richness-productivity relationship using novel data from a globally-coordinated (17), distributed, scale-standardized and consistently designed survey, in which plant richness and biomass were m...

Infrared radiation emitted from a planet contains information about the chemical composition and vertical temperature profile of its atmosphere. If upper layers are cooler than lower layers, molecular gases will produce absorption features in the planetary thermal spectrum. Conversely, if there is a stratosphere-where temperature increases with altitude-these molecular features will be observed in emission. It has been suggested that stratospheres could form in highly irradiated exoplanets, but the extent to which this occurs is unresolved both theoretically and observationally. A previous claim for the presence of a stratosphere remains open to question, owing to the challenges posed by the highly variable host star and the low spectral resolution of the measurements. Here we report a near-infrared thermal spectrum for the ultrahot gas giant WASP-121b, which has an equilibrium temperature of approximately 2,500 kelvin. Water is resolved in emission, providing a detection of an exoplanet stratosphere at 5σ confidence. These observations imply that a substantial fraction of incident stellar radiation is retained at high altitudes in the atmosphere, possibly by absorbing chemical species such as gaseous vanadium oxide and titanium oxide.

We present a new MHD model for simulating the large-scale structure of the solar corona and solar wind under "steady state" conditions stemming from the Wang-Sheeley-Arge empirical model. The processes of turbulent heating in the solar wind are parameterized using a phenomenological, thermodynamical model with a varied polytropic index. We employ the Bernoulli integral to bridge the asymptotic solar wind speed with the assumed distribution of the polytropic index on the solar surface. We successfully reproduce the mass flux from Sun to Earth, the temperature structure, and the large-scale structure of the magnetic field. We reproduce the solar wind speed bimodal structure in the inner heliosphere. However, the solar wind speed is in a quantitative agreement with observations at 1 AU for solar maximum conditions only. The magnetic field comparison demonstrates that the input magnetogram needs to be multiplied by a scaling factor in order to obtain the correct magnitude at 1 AU.

Analysis of a database of solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and associated flares over the period 1996-2007 finds well-behaved power law relationships between the 1-8Å flare X-ray fluence and CME mass and kinetic energy. We extrapolate these relationships to lower and higher flare energies to estimate the mass and energy loss due to CMEs from stellar coronae, assuming that the observed X-ray emission of the latter is dominated by flares with a frequency as a function of energy dn/dE = kE −α . For solar-like stars at saturated levels of X-ray activity, the implied losses depend fairly weakly on the assumed value of α and are very large:Ṁ ∼ 5×10 −10 M ⊙ yr −1 andĖ ∼ 0.1L ⊙ . In order to avoid such large energy requirements, either the relationships between CME mass and speed and flare energy must flatten for X-ray fluence 10 31 erg, or the flare-CME association must drop significantly below 1 for more energetic events. If active coronae are dominated by flares, then the total coronal energy budget is likely to be up to an order of magnitude larger than the canonical 10 −3 L bol X-ray saturation threshold. This raises the question of what is the maximum energy a magnetic dynamo can extract from a star? For an energy budget of 1% of L bol , the CME mass loss rate is about 5 × 10 −11 M ⊙ yr −1 .

We address the important question of whether the newly discovered exoplanet, Proxima Centauri b (PCb), is capable of retaining an atmosphere over long periods of time. This is done by adapting a sophisticated multi-species MHD model originally developed for Venus and Mars, and computing the ion escape losses from PCb. The results suggest that the ion escape rates are about two orders of magnitude higher than the terrestrial planets of our Solar system if PCb is unmagnetized. In contrast, if the planet does have an intrinsic dipole magnetic field, the rates are lowered for certain values of the stellar wind dynamic pressure, but they are still higher than the observed values for our Solar system's terrestrial planets. These results must be interpreted with due caution, since most of the relevant parameters for PCb remain partly or wholly unknown.