Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well-being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and management may put this buffering capacity at risk. Here, we summarise the evidence that reductions in biodiversity can destabilise the functioning of ecosystems facing climate extremes. We then explore if impaired ecosystem functioning could, in turn, exacerbate climate extremes. We argue that only a comprehensive approach, incorporating both ecological and hydrometeorological perspectives, enables to understand and predict the entire feedback system between altered biodiversity and climate extremes. This ambition, however, requires a reformulation of current research priorities to emphasise the bidirectional effects that link ecology and atmospheric processes.

Preprint of a paper that is submitted to the “Journal of Selected Topics in Earth Observation and Remote sensing” with the following abstract: It is widely assumed that C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signal do not reach the forest floor in dense forests, and that hence C-Band SAR cannot be used for sub-canopy flood mapping in tropical forests. Indeed, flooded and non-flooded forests are not distinguishable in single C-Band acquisitions. The question is whether long-term seasonal dynamics in C- Band SAR time series data encode flooding dynamics under- neath the canopy. In this paper we investigate the relationship of Sentinel-1 backscatter with sub-canopy flooding in the Amazon rain forest. We use the Empirical Mode Decomposition to extract annual modes in the backscatter signal and use the correlation to the water level of a nearby river to understand the dynamics of the Sentinel-1 signal. Clusters of these correlations coincide well with known forest flooding areas in the VH signal. The analysis shows that the Sentinel-1 C-Band backscatter is influenced by floodings underneath the canopy in the Amazon rain forest. The presented approach could allow to systematically map flooded areas throughout tropical rain forests.