CLIMATE CHANGE

Keywords: biodiversity, biogeochemistry, climate change, drought, ecosystem functioning, nutrient cycling, water

Project Outline

Climate change and loss of biodiversity are two concurrent environmental trends and important ecological research areas. For experimental model systems it has been shown that diverse communities are to some extent able to buffer negative effects of climate change on ecosystem processes.

We tested this insurance function of biodiversity in seminatural grasslands communities differing in management intensity and biodiversity. The target communities were part of the external page Biodiversity Exploratories programme established in Germany. The diversity gradient established in the Exploratories offers a great opportunity to investigate how plant communities are able to modulate climatic change effects, which we simulate experimentally. Climate change manipulations included increasing air temperature in early spring (open top chambers) and reduced rainfall during summer (rainout shelters).

We hypothesized that increased spring temperature and reduced summer precipitation will lead to changes in vegetation composition, which will have repercussions for litter production, soil water depletion, and nitrogen cycling. Quantifying these biogeochemical processes under ambient and climate change conditions in dependence of plant diversity was the key aim of this project. It was linked to core and complementary contributing projects within the Biodiversity Exploratories in order to provide a sound understand of the interaction of climate change and biodiversity in grasslands.