sRealBioFun - Using long-term resurvey data and biodiversity experiments to predict ecosystem consequences of real-world biodiversity change
First meeting: 07.-10.04.2025
iDiv member:
Helge Bruelheide
Nico Eisenhauer
Christiane Roscher
Project summary:
Changes in climate and land use threaten biodiversity and thus ecosystem functions and services. Studies of long-term biodiversity change and experimental studies on effects of biodiversity change have largely proceeded independently. We propose to link long-term resurvey data of plant communities with results from biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) experiments to quantify and compare temporal trends among plant species, identify threats to plant diversity in different ecosystems, and predict the consequences of real-world plant diversity change to ecosystem functioning. We will rely on high-quality vegetation resurvey data available for temperate forests, grasslands, and Succulent Karoo to quantify species abundance changes. We will apply hierarchical Bayesian modeling to infer how environmental factors and species attributes drive these changes. This will allow us to identify and rank threats to different plant species in BEF experiments from USA, Europe, and China and forecast how expected biodiversity changes will affect ecosystem functioning under different environmental conditions. This synthesis will improve our understanding of how climate change and land-use intensification affect plant diversity and ecosystem functions, improving our ability to conserve biodiversity and ameliorate impacts associated with its loss.
In person participants:
tba
Remote partcipants:
tba
Meeting report:
tba
