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Abstract QuestionsGrasslands provide important provisioning services worldwide and their management has consequences for these services. Management intensification is a widespread land‐use change and has accelerated across North America to meet rising demands on productivity, yet its impact on the relationship between plant diversity and productivity is still unclear. Here, we investigated the relationship between plant diversity and grassland productivity across nine ecoclimatic domains of the continental United States. We also tested the effect of management intensification on diversity and productivity in four case studies. MethodsWe acquired remotely sensed gross primary productivity data (GPP, 1986–2018) and plant diversity data measured at different spatial scales (1, 10, 100, 400 m²), as well as climate variables including the Palmer drought index from two ecological networks. We used general linear mixed models to relate GPP to plant diversity across sites. For the case study analysis, we used linear mixed models to relate plant diversity to management intensity, and tested if the management intensity influenced the relationship between GPP (mean and temporal variation) and drought. ResultsAcross all sites, we observed positive relationships among species richness, productivity, and the temporal stability of mean annual biomass production. These relationships were not affected by the scale at which species richness was observed. In three out of the four case studies, we observed that management effects on species richness were only significant at broader scales (i.e., ≥10 m²) with no clear effect found at the commonly used 1‐m²quadrat scale. In one case study, species‐poor, intensively managed pastures presented the highest productivity but were more sensitive to dry conditions than less intensified pastures. However, in other case studies, we did not observe significant effects of management intensity on the magnitude or stability of productivity. ConclusionsGeneralization across studies may be difficult and require the development of intensification indices general enough to be applied across diverse management strategies in grazilands. Understanding how management intensification affects grassland productivity will inform the development of sustainable intensification strategies. 

Abstract Earthworms are an important soil taxon as ecosystem engineers, providing a variety of crucial ecosystem functions and services. Little is known about their diversity and distribution at large spatial scales, despite the availability of considerable amounts of local-scale data. Earthworm diversity data, obtained from the primary literature or provided directly by authors, were collated with information on site locations, including coordinates, habitat cover, and soil properties. Datasets were required, at a minimum, to include abundance or biomass of earthworms at a site. Where possible, site-level species lists were included, as well as the abundance and biomass of individual species and ecological groups. This global dataset contains 10,840 sites, with 184 species, from 60 countries and all continents except Antarctica. The data were obtained from 182 published articles, published between 1973 and 2017, and 17 unpublished datasets. Amalgamating data into a single global database will assist researchers in investigating and answering a wide variety of pressing questions, for example, jointly assessing aboveground and belowground biodiversity distributions and drivers of biodiversity change.