Prof Hamed Gholizadeh, Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University (USA)

talk details:

"Using remote sensing technology for mapping an invasive alien plant in grasslands"

Grassland ecosystems are threatened by invasive alien plants as well as disturbances and land-use change, which in turn can facilitate invasions. If their rapid expansion continues, invasive alien plants will have enormous negative impacts on grasslands ecosystem services, biodiversity, and their capacity to retain existing function and structure in the face of environmental change. Given the transboundary impacts of invasive alien plants, mapping their spread and studying mechanisms of invasion require large-scale monitoring systems.

We used a remote sensing technology known as “imaging spectroscopy” and asked whether it can assist us to detect an invasive alien plant called Lespedeza Cuneata and identify its success strategies in a large naturally-assembled grassland in the U.S. Southern Great Plains. Results indicate the promise of remote sensing technology for mapping invasive alien plants from above and identifying functional traits associated with their success strategies. This research can fill knowledge gaps surrounding remote detection of invasive alien plants in grasslands, where direct mapping of invasive plants is deemed challenging because of scale mismatch between spatial resolution of remotely-sensed data and plant size.

Philip Townsend, Professor at the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin – Madison (USA)

talk details: tba

sTETRA working group

Mike McWilliam, Postdoctoral Researcher, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (USA)

"Trait-based filtering and biodiversity change on coral reefs"

Human pressures can select against organisms that are poorly suited to novel or extreme conditions (environmental ‘filtering’). Coral reefs are increasingly affected by climate change, raising questions about the species and communities that are likely to ‘pass through’ the climatic filter, and persist in warmer, acidified oceans. In this talk, I will argue that a better grasp of trait-based filtering processes can improve our understanding of biodiversity change on coral reefs. My recent work suggests that filtering under chronic and acute environmental change can favour the persistence of highly susceptible species, that filtering occurs as much within species as it does across species, and that filtering acts on the net sum of whole phenotypes rather than single traits. These results indicate that the traits facilitating persistence across environmental filters can be difficult to quantify, but that biodiversity change is inherently predictable, and driven by persistent trait-based or demographic forces.

Host: Experimental Interaction Ecology

Prof. Wolfgang Weisser, Chair for Terrestrial Ecology at the Technical University of Munich

"Increasing biodiversity and human-nature interactions in cities – obstacles and possible solutions"

Many animal species can live in the urban environment, but we still have a limited understanding of how urban form, the result of human design, influences the occurrence of species in the city. It is also an open question how urban form needs to be modified in order to increase biodiversity in cities, with the consequence that goals such as creating a green infrastructure currently remain largely theoretical concepts. One underlying reason for these deficits is that ecologists and planners – along with other humans – differentiate people from nature, and consider cities as a special and somewhat unnatural place for animals other than humans. I will use a number of examples from our work to illustrate how human design affects the presence of animals in cities, and how a modification of urban design in cooperation with landscape architects, urban planners or architects offers great potential for urban biodiversity conservation. I will argue that in order to better contribute to biodiversity conservation in cities, urban ecology needs to develop tangible solutions that are aligned with existing urban planning frameworks. To do so, we need a better understanding of animal community assembly in cities and a better insight into the complex nature of human-animal relationships.

Host: sDiv working group INTRACO

Camille Girard-Tercieux, PhD student in tropical ecology and modelisation at CNRS,  Isabelle Maréchaux, Researcher at the INRAE & AMAP lab (Montpellier), Ghislain Vieilledent, ecologist at Cirad

talk details:

Rethinking the role of intraspecific variability in species coexistence

Intraspecific variability (IV) has been proposed as a new track to explain species coexistence. Previous studies generally assumed, although often non-explicitly, that IV results from intrinsic differences between conspecific individuals. Under this hypothesis, IV either (i) blurred species differences, thus promoting transient or unstable coexistence, (ii) disproportionately advantaged the strongest competitor, thus hindering coexistence, or (iii) promoted coexistence. Based on a body of evidence, we here emphasize that IV does not necessarily imply inherent differences among conspecific individuals, nor species niches overlap: conspecific individuals can also differ in their measured attributes due to differences in the micro-environment they thrive in. If this source of variation is predominant, which we suggest it is in many cases given the variation of the environment in numerous dimensions at fine scales and the observed spatial structure of IV, it implies that conspecific individuals respond more similarly to environmental variation than heterospecific individuals, thereby concentrating competition within species -- a necessary condition for species coexistence. Importantly, as the number of environmental dimensions that are typically observed and characterized in the field is generally much lower than the actual number of environmental dimensions that influence individual attributes, a great part of observed IV can often be misinterpreted as random variation across individuals while being environmentally-driven, with radically different consequences for community dynamics. We call for new studies exploring observed IV as an outcome of species-specific responses to high-dimensional environmental variations that can lead to inversions of species hierarchy in space and time promoting stable coexistence.

Host: sDiv

Grégoire Dubois,Leader of the Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra (Italy)

Talk details:

"Everything you always wanted to know about the Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity of the European Commission but were too afraid to ask."

Host: Molecular Interaction Ecology

Prof Dr Emily Poppenborg Martin, Zoological Biodiversity, Institute of Geobotany, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany

Talk details:

"Arthropod functional diversity and ecosystem services in farmland: pathways to prediction, pathways to enhancement?"

Managing agricultural landscapes to support biodiversity and associated ecosystem services, such as pollination and natural pest control, could be a key avenue towards sustainable and climate-resilient agriculture that works for farmers. However, precisely how to manage these landscapes – and how effective this will be - is unclear. In syntheses of data from studies across Europe and the world, I examine how landscape composition and configuration impact arthropods, pest control, pollination and yields. Based on these results and ‘archetypes‘ of species’ traits, pathways to predictively assess ecosystem service potential can be derived to anticipate the effects of landscape- and field-scale management strategies towards workable ecological intensification of agriculture under global change. Bridging conventional European and smallholder farming systems in East Africa, I then highlight key knowledge gaps for the expansion of biodiversity-enhancing intensification practices and discuss implications for future biodiversity-driven agroecosystems.

www.idiv.de/conference

Host: Evolutionary Ecology

Evan Fricke, Research Scientist at the University of Maryland (USA)

Talk details:

"Linking changing animal biodiversity, ecological networks, and ecosystem functioning with global trait-based models"

Changes to animal biodiversity often impact ecosystem functioning through alteration of networks of ecological interactions among species. Yet empirical data on species interactions and their links to ecosystem functioning are relatively limited. This hampers the ability to quantify how animal biodiversity changes affect ecological networks and ecosystem functioning at large spatiotemporal scales. In this talk, I will discuss how we have used data synthesis and machine learning to predict species interactions and their links to ecosystem function based on species traits. I will show how such models can be used for analyses of changing ecological networks and animal functional roles over space and time. As examples of this approach, I will present an analysis of global seed dispersal decline and its implications for plants’ ability to track climate change, as well as a project to hindcast mammal food webs globally since the Late Pleistocene.

Host: sDiv

Sebastian Preidl, a Research fellow at the Department Remote Sensing at the UFZ and part of the RSC4Earth team

"Mapping land cover at species level for applications in agriculture, forestry and nature conservation"

About half of Germany's total land area is used for agricultural production, and about one third is forested. Mapping land cover in these landscapes at the species level can provide more detailed information for environmental models and contribute to a better understanding of ecological processes. Furthermore, continuous monitoring is important to detect changes in vegetation due to management practices or climate change impacts.

High temporal and high spatial resolution satellite data of the Copernicus mission allow to distinguish plant species based on their spectral characteristics. However, approaches are needed to deal with cloud contaminated data and to take into account regional biogeographical conditions at the national level. In this context, the classification approach APiC (Preidl et al., 2020) is presented.

First, APiC was used to classify 19 crop types across Germany based on Sentinel-2 data from 2016 with an overall accuracy of 88% (www.ufz.de/land-cover-classification). Agricultural crops for subsequent years (2017-2020) are currently being mapped using the same routine. Time series analyses can be used to better assess the effects of crop rotation on the spread of pests or on the pollination performance of bees. Secondly, the main tree species in Germany were classified using forest inventory data and Sentinel-2 data from 2015-2017. With additional data on the potential natural vegetation, this information was essential to evaluate forest types from a nature conservation perspective.

Preidl, S., M. Lange, D. Doktor (2020): Introducing APiC for regionalised land cover mapping on the national scale using Sentinel-2A imagery, Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 240, Article 111673, DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2020.111673.

Host: Biodiversity Conservation

Taylor Dotson, a sabbatical at iDiv’s Biodiversity Conservation research group and Associate Professor at New Mexico Tech (USA)

Talk details:

"After Alarmism? Moving Beyond Disaster Metaphors as Political Frames for Global Crises"

Whether it be for carbon emissions, COVID, or biodiversity loss, advocates of change often emphasize the catastrophic potential of inaction. Disaster or war metaphors are common, presenting the problem as not merely concerning but as reason for alarm. Climate change is like a comet strike. COVID is like 9/11. Nature is under siege. These metaphors may offer rhetorical advantages, but they also frame the political debate in less-than-helpful ways. While catastrophic political frames can act as motivating calls to action among the already convinced, they also come with thought-constraining assumptions about the nature, cause, and solution to public problems. Framing global crises, such as COVID or the climate, as disasters tends to overemphasize the impact of deficits in factual beliefs and of individual ameliorative action. Excessive convergence on this frame narrowly circumscribes political discourse, leaving advocates of change less prepared to understand the apathy or opposition of others and distracting from the deeper infrastructural changes that could also help reduce risks. In examining the downsides of alarmist framings for COVID and climate change, I hope to provoke a constructive conversation among audience members about how advocates of biodiversity protection might better navigate the political dilemmas posed by chronic global crises. 

Host: Biodiversity Synthesis

Amanda Taylor, Postdoc Researcher, University of Göttingen

talk details:

"Towards an understanding of species and trait assembly in dynamic island systems"

Understanding the mechanisms shaping species assemblages remains one of the greatest challenges to the field of ecology. Islands, due to their discrete nature and evolutionary history have played a major role in unravelling these mechanisms, particularly with respect to the distribution of biodiversity, community assembly and evolution. One central concept in island biology is that only subset of species is able to disperse to, colonise and diversify on islands, resulting in an over- or under-representation of certain taxonomic groups relative to mainland source regions. This unbalanced composition, termed ‘disharmony’, is strong evidence for constraints or ‘filtering’ effects acting on the dynamics of island colonisation, extinction, and diversification. In this seminar and using the megadiverse Orchidaceae as a model group, I illustrate the different factors shaping species and trait assembly on islands, from dispersal to environmental filtering, to species interactions and in-situ speciation.

Host: Molecular Interaction Ecology

Yuko Ulrich,  Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Lise Meitner Group Leader

Yuko has received an ERC starting grant and a tenure track Lise Meisner Group at the MPI Chemical Ecology.

Talk details:

"Division of Labour and Disease Dynamics in Ant Societies"

Group-living is a widespread strategy that comes with particular costs and benefits. Here, I will describe recent findings on the emergence and regulation of division of labour—a proposed benefit of group-living—in ant colonies. I will then explain how we plan to build on this work to study if and how social organisation can mitigate the risk of disease outbreak that is often associated with group-living. This work capitalises on a new, experimentally accessible system for the study of social behaviour, the clonal raider ant, and on custom tools for the automated tracking of individual and social behaviour in groups.

Book Fair (17-20.3.)

Host: sRedList working group

Moreno Di Marco, Assistant Professor, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)

Talk details:

"Accelerating extinction risk assessment to support global biodiversity monitoring"

Monitoring extinction risk is essential to track the effectiveness of conservation action. The IUCN Red List is the most authoritative source to document species’ extinction risk, but keeping Red List information consistent and up-to-date, while increasing the number of species assessed, is problematic. The last decade has seen rapid advancement of comparative extinction risk analysis, which can be used to streamline and standardise global extinction risk assessment and monitoring. Yet, much remains to be resolved before a full integration of comparative extinction risk analysis is possible in the IUCN Red List. The sRedList Working Group gathers modelers and Red List practitioners in order to summarise and further develop the scientific tools that can help Red List assessors with relevant data and outputs. This talk will present some of the recent progress on global extinction risk modelling, the challenges behind it, and the way forward promoted by sRedList.

Host: Theory in Biodiversity Science

Jacques Gignoux, Sorbonne University of Paris, Research Scientist

Talk details:

"How to model any ecosystem: the 3Worlds simulation platform"

Jacques Gignoux (iEES), Ian D. Davies & Shayne R. Flint (Australian National University)

Ecology studies a large range of objects (eg the biosphere, protists in a drop of water, a green roof), addresses very difficult questions (eg how does climate change affect biodiversity, how did sociality evolve in insects, how do carbon fluxes modify the spatial structure of ecosystems), and uses a wide panel of often incompatible modelling methods to solve them (eg differential equations, cellular automata, individual-based models). It may seem unreachable to find a common point among this diversity of approaches. We demonstrated that the ecosystem concept was well adapted to a very generic modelling. Using a dynamic graph to represent an ecosystem, we have been able to write a simulation software which can model any type of ecosystem and address a wide range of questions. This software is a platform, i.e. it enables any modeller to build a specific model to address a particular ecological question within a generic framework. This simulator implements state-of-the-art computing techniques to free the ecological modeller from computing issues (algorithms, optimisation, deployment) and focus on the ecological questions. This, together with a quick visual feedback on the computations, considerably speeds up the construction of a particular model. The common framework of 3Worlds enables to compare model structure, currently impossible - a problem that is often invoked to put down the validity of the predictions of big simulators. I will present some (simple) examples of applications of 3Worlds to various ecological questions in order to show its adaptability.

Host: Evolutionary and Anthropocene Ecology

Serge Wich, School of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

"Drones, conservation, and machine learning: state-of-the-art and future"

Host: Biodiversity Conservation

Dr. Bernard W.T. Coetzee

Senior Lecturer, Department of Zoology and Entomology (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

www.bernardcoetzee.com

"Artificial Light at Night as a global change driver"

Host: EvoEco

Susan R. Whitehead, Assistant professor at Virginia Tech.:

"Rewards, toxins, and trade-offs: the chemical ecology of seed dispersal"

Host:BioCon

Marek Giergiczny, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economic Sciences, (University of Warsaw)

Title & Abstract tbd

Host: EA

Dirk Karger, Senior Researcher, WSL (Switzerland), Biodiversity and Conservation Biology

"Quantifying climate impacts on mountain ecosystems"

Host: Christine Fürst, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Institute for Geosciences and Geography

Professor, Jiquan Chen, (Michigan State University), Sabbatical guest hosted by Christine Fürst, at the MLU

Title & Abstract tbd