sRealBioFun

Using long-term resurvey data and biodiversity experiments to predict ecosystem consequences of real-world biodiversity change

First meeting: 07.04. – 10.04.2025

PIs:

Yuxin Chen
Donald Waller

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: 

Helge Bruelheide (MLU), Yuxin Chen (Xiamen University), Nico Eisenhauer (iDiv), Daniela Hoss (iDiv), Yuanyuan Huang (iDiv), Ziyuan Lin (Xiamen University), Noémie Pichon (WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF), Christiane Roscher (iDiv), Ute Schmiedel (University of Hamburg, Institute of Plant Science and Microbiology), Ingmar Staude (UL), Liting Su (Xiamen University), Donald Waller (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Remote partcipants: 

Eric Allan (University of Bern), Forest Isbell (University of Minnesota), Daijiang Li* (University of Arizona), Yue QIU (Xiamen University)