Aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are tightly linked through flows of energy, materials, and organisms. At the landscape scale, they form so-called meta-ecosystems. We hypothesized that:

• Type and magnitude of terrestrial subsidies play key roles in determining community structure, including food-web structure, with notable consequences at all levels of biodiversity and repercussions for ecosystem functioning.
• Spatial arrangement as well as the type and strength of linkages in addition to the intrinsic ecological characteristics of the constituent ecosystems are important determinants of overall biodiversity patterns at the landscape scale.

We used and integrated information on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning at different spatial and temporal scales, spanning from the genetic diversity of selected populations to whole communities and from short-term processes such as extreme weather events to multi-annual variability including global climate change. Guided by food-web, network and meta-ecosystem theory, we considered species, genetic, functional-trait and ecosystem diversity through a balanced use of observational, experimental, and modeling approaches.