Environmental change is altering the composition and functioning of the earth’s ecosystems. We aim to embrace the complexity of terrestrial ecosystems by considering interactions among organisms above and below the ground as well as within and across trophic levels.

Our main questions are:

• How does environmental change affect the composition and biodiversity of ecosystems?
• How are shifts in community composition and biodiversity related to the functioning and service provisioning of ecosystems?

We answer these questions in biodiversity and climate change experiments as well as in observation studies. We focus on the taxonomic and functional composition of food webs and the processes they drive. Global meta-analyses and syntheses allow us to identify general principles across ecosystems. We believe that interdisciplinary research advances our understanding of the composition and functioning of ecological communities, how they function in a changing world, and how this is related to human well-being.

If you want to learn more, please visit our public exhibition here.