Linking vegetation change, carbon sequestration and biodiversity: insights from island ecosystems in a long-term natural experiment

1. Despite recent interest in linkages between above- and below-ground communities and their consequences for ecosystem processes, much remains unknown about their responses to long-term ecosystem change. We synthesize multiple lines of evidence from a long-term natural experiment to illustrate how ecosystem retrogression (the decline in ecosystem process rates due to long-term absence of major disturbance) drives vegetation change, and thus above-ground and below-ground carbon (C) sequestration, and communities of consumer biota.