Botany (Core project) - Biodiversity Exploratories
Background
The Biodiversity Exploratories are a unique, open research platform for investigating the functional significance of biodiversity under different levels of land use intensity and the largest of its kind in Europe. As part of an initiative to promote biodiversity research in Germany, three large long-term study areas were established in Germany in 2006-2009. These exploratories are used for both comparative and experimental research under real-world land-use conditions, with the aim of unravelling the relationships between land use, biodiversity and ecosystem functions. The German Research Foundation (DFG) has been funding this project since its inception, making biodiversity research possible for the first time on a large scale, on real farmland, combined with a long-term perspective. The project is currently in its eighth phase, which will end at the end of February 2029.
Aims
The interdisciplinary research of the Biodiversity Exploratories examines
- how the form and intensities of land use affect biodiversity and ecosystem processes
- how different components of biodiversity interact
- how different components of biodiversity influence ecosystem processes and ecosystem services
The Botany Core project is currently focusing in particular on the temporal development of plant diversity and grassland productivity, as well as the influence of climate change, land use extensification, dispersal limitation and disturbance on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. As primary producers, plants are fundamental to understand the effects of land use on ecosystem processes because many land-use effects will be mediated via changes in plant diversity with cascading effects through the entire food web. Apart from providing long-term data on the diversity of plants in grassland and forest, the project examines community stability, regenerative capacity after disturbances, and temporal trends in community composition.