| 1 | Defaunation in the Anthropocene | Science | 2014 | 3,426 |
| 2 | European phenological response to climate change matches the warming pattern | Global Change Biology | 2006 | 2,651 |
| 3 | Herbivory in global climate change research: direct effects of rising temperature on insect herbivores | Global Change Biology | 2002 | 2,175 |
| 4 | An assessment of the global impact of 21st century land use change on soil erosion | Nature Communications | 2017 | 2,012 |
| 5 | Safeguarding pollinators and their values to human well-being | Nature | 2016 | 1,651 |
| 6 | Scientists' warning on invasive alien species | Biological Reviews | 2020 | 1,637 |
| 7 | TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access | Global Change Biology | 2020 | 1,628 |
| 8 | Soil bacterial networks are less stable under drought than fungal networks | Nature Communications | 2018 | 1,571 |
| 9 | The global nitrogen cycle in the twenty-first century | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | 2013 | 1,374 |
| 10 | Review of antibiotic resistance in China and its environment | Environment International | 2018 | 1,342 |
| 11 | Impact of Nitrogen Deposition on the Species Richness of Grasslands | Science | 2004 | 1,329 |
| 12 | The distributions of a wide range of taxonomic groups are expanding polewards | Global Change Biology | 2006 | 1,299 |
| 13 | Attenuation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa virulence by quorum sensing inhibitors | EMBO Journal | 2003 | 1,276 |
| 14 | Biodiversity and Resilience of Ecosystem Functions | Trends in Ecology and Evolution | 2015 | 1,232 |
| 15 | Tropospheric ozone and its precursors from the urban to the global scale from air quality to short-lived climate forcer | Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics | 2015 | 1,202 |
| 16 | Evaluation of the terrestrial carbon cycle, future plant geography and climate‐carbon cycle feedbacks using five Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) | Global Change Biology | 2008 | 1,169 |
| 17 | Threats to an ecosystem service: pressures on pollinators | Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment | 2013 | 1,165 |
| 18 | Costs of dispersal | Biological Reviews | 2012 | 1,145 |
| 19 | An enzymic 'latch' on a global carbon store | Nature | 2001 | 1,102 |
| 20 | Understanding and managing conservation conflicts | Trends in Ecology and Evolution | 2013 | 1,100 |
| 21 | The minimum information about a genome sequence (MIGS) specification | Nature Biotechnology | 2008 | 1,095 |
| 22 | Long-term decline in krill stock and increase in salps within the Southern Ocean | Nature | 2004 | 1,063 |
| 23 | Defining seasonal marine microbial community dynamics | ISME Journal | 2011 | 1,032 |
| 24 | Land use and climate change impacts on global soil erosion by water (2015-2070) | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | 2020 | 1,025 |
| 25 | A global meta‐analysis of the relative extent of intraspecific trait variation in plant communities | Ecology Letters | 2015 | 984 |
| 26 | Combatting global grassland degradation | Nature Reviews Earth & Environment | 2021 | 978 |
| 27 | Impacts of soil and water pollution on food safety and health risks in China | Environment International | 2015 | 971 |
| 28 | How well do we understand the impacts of alien species on ecosystem services? A pan‐European, cross‐taxa assessment | Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment | 2010 | 959 |
| 29 | Indirect radiative forcing of climate change through ozone effects on the land-carbon sink | Nature | 2007 | 946 |
| 30 | Rapid and highly variable warming of lake surface waters around the globe | Geophysical Research Letters | 2015 | 931 |
| 31 | Soil nematode abundance and functional group composition at a global scale | Nature | 2019 | 917 |
| 32 | Bending the Curve of Global Freshwater Biodiversity Loss: An Emergency Recovery Plan | BioScience | 2020 | 910 |
| 33 | The GenTree Dendroecological Collection, tree-ring and wood density data from seven tree species across Europe | Scientific Data | 2020 | 884 |
| 34 | Phenological sensitivity to climate across taxa and trophic levels | Nature | 2016 | 883 |
| 35 | The role of ecological theory in microbial ecology | Nature Reviews Microbiology | 2007 | 881 |
| 36 | Grasping at the routes of biological invasions: a framework for integrating pathways into policy | Journal of Applied Ecology | 2008 | 868 |
| 37 | The contribution of species richness and composition to bacterial services | Nature | 2005 | 860 |
| 38 | The bacterial biogeography of British soils | Environmental Microbiology | 2011 | 849 |
| 39 | The European Water Framework Directive at the age of 10: A critical review of the achievements with recommendations for the future | Science of the Total Environment | 2010 | 836 |
| 40 | Global change pressures on soils from land use and management | Global Change Biology | 2016 | 831 |
| 41 | UNetFormer: A UNet-like transformer for efficient semantic segmentation of remote sensing urban scene imagery | ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing | 2022 | 826 |
| 42 | Comparative Losses of British Butterflies, Birds, and Plants and the Global Extinction Crisis | Science | 2004 | 814 |
| 43 | Grasslands—more important for ecosystem services than you might think | Ecosphere | 2019 | 804 |
| 44 | Creation of the WATCH Forcing Data and Its Use to Assess Global and Regional Reference Crop Evaporation over Land during the Twentieth Century | Journal of Hydrometeorology | 2011 | 782 |
| 45 | Detection of a direct carbon dioxide effect in continental river runoff records | Nature | 2006 | 764 |
| 46 | Soil networks become more connected and take up more carbon as nature restoration progresses | Nature Communications | 2017 | 751 |
| 47 | Changing climate shifts timing of European floods | Science | 2017 | 750 |
| 48 | Trophic level asynchrony in rates of phenological change for marine, freshwater and terrestrial environments | Global Change Biology | 2010 | 749 |
| 49 | Hyperresolution global land surface modeling: Meeting a grand challenge for monitoring Earth's terrestrial water | Water Resources Research | 2011 | 720 |
| 50 | Evaluation of terrestrial carbon cycle models for their response to climate variability and to CO2 trends | Global Change Biology | 2013 | 711 |