The genomic landscape of meiotic recombination plays an essential role in the evolution of eukaryotes. Patterns of recombination are highly dynamic, with variation along chromosomes, between sexes, individuals, populations, and species. These quantitative variations are driven by allelic variation, environmental factors, and interactions between both. In many eukaryotes, recombination rates...
Agricultural expansion into natural habitats and unsustainable practices, like those caused by oil palm cultivation in Southeast Asia, harm biodiversity. Wildlife in these disturbed areas faces threats from humans, predators, and pesticides, but how these factors affect their health is less understood. We studied wild southern pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) living at the interface...
Soil biodiversity is essential for healthy ecosystems, yet it remains largely overlooked in nature conservation efforts. Our research highlights major gaps: protected areas in Europe showed no general positive effect on soil biodiversity and functioning such as nutrient cycling and carbon storage. Soil organisms, like earthworms, springtails, and fungi, are threatened by climate change,...
Anthropogenic impacts such as deforestation, habitat fragmentation and hunting have a significant impact on wildlife, reducing biodiversity and affecting the physiological health of many endangered species. To monitor the welfare of wildlife, the use of non-invasively collected samples such as feces is becoming increasingly valuable for environmental and ecological research. Fecal metabolomics...
Fruits have evolved a range of traits to attract seed dispersers, in which chemical signals, such as scent, play a key role. Among these, aliphatic esters are notable for their consistent presence in ripe fruits of species that rely on frugivores for seed dispersal, yet their ecological role and evolutionary origin remain poorly understood. Emerging evidence suggests that these compounds may...
Seeds harbor diverse microbial communities, both on their surfaces (epiphytes) and within their tissues (endophytes). While seed endophytes remained largely overlooked for decades, recent research highlights their critical roles in seedling development, including promoting nutrient uptake and protecting against pathogens. However, the factors shaping seed and seedling microbiomes remain poorly...
Plant genetics has long relied on the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, which has been instrumental in uncovering the molecular basis of ecologically important adaptations—such as temperature sensing, flowering time regulation, and communication with microbial and fungal pathogens. However, most gene functions have been studied under controlled laboratory conditions, often overlooking the...
Untargeted metabolomics has transformed ecological research by revealing the extraordinary chemical diversity of organisms and their interactions. Yet most signals detected by LC-MS remain unannotated, forming the so-called ‘dark metabolome’. A contemporary and growing debate asks: does the dark metabolome reflect a vast unknown chemical space, or are we inflating chemical diversity through...
Ecological restoration is today essential to reverse ecosystem degradation. It encompasses multiple approaches including rewilding which aims at improving the condition of ecosystems by recovering natural ecological processes. Focusing on functionality rewilding targets self-sustaining ecosystems that provide multiple ecosystem services and require little to no human management in the long...
Ecometabolomics has long been a cornerstone of biodiversity research at iDiv. To strengthen this approach, the Ecometeor platform was established to integrate advanced metabolomics techniques and expertise into iDiv’s research, with the goal of uncovering the chemical mechanisms underlying ecological patterns and processes in plants, insects, soil, water, and even the atmosphere. Although the...
In plants and animals, pollen and sperm morphology are incredibly diverse across species. Cross-pollination provides a mechanism to recombine genetic variants in a population which, among other evolutionary forces, may facilitate adaptation. Across plant species, pollen morphological diversity is broadly linked to different pollination systems. However, the extent of within-species diversity...
Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) are used to monitor the status and trends in biodiversity at multiple spatiotemporal scales. These provide an abstraction level between raw biodiversity observations and indicators, enabling better access to policy-relevant biodiversity information. Furthermore, the EBV vision aims to support detection of critical change with easy to use tools and...
Plant invasions are biogeographical phenomena that may involve shifts in belowground plant–fungal interactions, such as the release from fungal pathogens or more beneficial interactions with mutualists in nonnative ranges. However, native and nonnative ranges are not uniform but environmentally heterogeneous, and plant–fungal interactions are strongly shaped by spatio-environmental context....
In Arabidopsis thaliana, the functions of only about 30% of genes have been experimentally characterized, partly because many gene functions are difficult to discern under laboratory conditions and might only be relevant under natural environments. Here, we conducted a comprehensive ecological study of Arabidopsis thaliana across natural habitats, integrating detailed phenotypic assessments...
Herbarium specimens offer valuable insights into changes of plant distribution from the past to the present, aiding in predicting future developments and responses to environmental changes. Over centuries, herbarium specimens have been collected, labeled with data like date and place of collection, collector, species name and information on habitat, and archived manually, leading to gigantic...
Forests dominated by arbuscular- (AMF) and ectomycorrhiza (EMF) differ in their carbon stocks and processes. However, differences in structure and function of higher trophic levels in these forests are largely unexplored. Here I summarise the results of our Emmy Noether project, testing hypothesis that the structure and trophic functions of soil food webs differ between AMF and EMF temperate...
Insects are home to a vast diversity of microbial communities, among which bacterial symbionts play a crucial role in host physiology, ecology, and evolution. They profoundly influence insect nutrition, immunity, and reproduction. Over millions of years of host association, many symbionts have undergone extensive genome reduction. This process - marked by the loss of genes unnecessary in the...
Understanding how global change drivers influence the functional traits of wild pollinators is critical for predicting ecological responses and guiding conservation strategies. Among these traits, body size plays a central role in bee ecology, affecting dispersal ability, foraging range, reproductive success and ecological interactions. However, the extent to which anthropogenic disturbances,...
Wounding occurs in all animals, including even tiny, often overlooked insects such as Drosophila melanogaster. Wounds can have diverse impacts on the animal’s fitness and ecology, such as the potential introduction of microbial symbionts which may act as pathogens, commensals or mutualists. Lab experiments demonstrated that the microbiome of Drosophila melanogaster influences their fitness...
Protists are key players in microbial food webs, yet their role in groundwater ecosystems remains understudied—partly due to limitations in quantifying their abundances using molecular methods. A major challenge lies in the highly variable number of 18S rRNA gene copies across taxa, which can lead to a drastic overestimation of the quantitative role of specific taxa in protistan...
Production forests are typically managed to optimize timber production, resulting in even-aged stands with few canopy gaps and little deadwood until the final harvest. This biotic homogenization can reduce biodiversity, with far-reaching consequences for ecosystem functioning and human well-being. To explore strategies that promote biodiversity while maintaining timber production, the BETA-FOR...
Habitat loss and agricultural intensification are considered major drivers of insect biodiversity decline, yet their impacts on insect genetic diversity remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates how human land-use practices, particularly the role of extensively managed meadows, affect insect genetic diversity to inform conservation strategies in fragmented agricultural...
The Brazilian Campos Rupestres (CR), ecosystems primarily found on mountaintops and high plateaus, harbor exceptional plant species richness, endemism, and functional diversity. Their unique combination of environmental conditions, e.g. shallow and nutrient-poor soils, high temperatures, intense solar radiation, water scarcity, and natural fire regimes, has potentially driven the evolution...
The culturally and economically significant Andean tree genus Polylepis—which forms the world’s highest-elevation treelines—has long eluded a well-supported phylogenetic reconstruction, possibly due to extensive gene flow, hybridization, and polyploidization. To address this, we investigate sympatric populations of P. neglecta (Bolivia) and P. incana (Ecuador) using genomic (ddRADseq)...
Prophages are integrated forms of phages (i.e. viruses that infect bacteria) within bacterial genomes. Beyond their role in horizontal gene transfer, prophages can carry genes that influence host metabolism and community function. They can be maintained in the host genome over generations, but they can also shift into a lytic cycle under environmental stress. This transition results in host...
The regeneration of pedunculate oak (Quercus robur L.), a light-demanding tree species crucial for Central European forest biodiversity, is hindered by homogenised, shaded conditions of dense forest stands. However, rising tree mortality caused by climate extremes and pathogens may provide a window of opportunity for oak regeneration.
In the meliorated Leipzig floodplain forest, we...
Microbes play a key role in plant health and development. They inhabit various plant tissues and are present throughout the plant’s life cycle. Over this journey through space and time, the microbial composition changes and adapts—this is also true when the plant encounters challenging conditions. Plants can recruit and modulate beneficial microbes; however, we still do not fully understand...
Bacteria are the most diverse and widespread organisms on Earth, playing essential roles in the ecosystems they inhabit. Despite advances in sequencing technologies, most bacterial diversity studies have focused on the Northern Hemisphere, leaving significant data gaps in the Global South, particularly in regions that face high risks of biodiversity loss due to human activity. The sIBTEDs...
The phyllosphere comprises the tissues and the surface of plant leaves and their microbiomes. Despite its ecological significance, the factors shaping foliar endophyte communities and their interactions with trees and shrubs remain largely unexplored. Here we use the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research platform BEF-China, where trees were planted in a broken-stick design along a...
Data collection, management, and reuse are increasingly important in the life sciences. In microbial ecology, sequencing has altered our relationship to the invisible microbial world and created massive amounts of reusable microbiome data, but these data are hard to integrate and underused. To foster sequence data reuse, we created the Microbial Community Database (MiCoDa), an open database of...
Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of droughts, leading to widespread tree mortality and growth reductions in forests. Yet, it remains unclear how different tree species regulate water loss under changing environmental conditions. Stomatal conductance (gs), which quantifies the ease with which gases diffuse through stomatal pores of leaves, plays a crucial role in...
Viruses are exceedingly numerous and diverse biological objects. Though for a long time viruses have been studied in terms of their medical and economic importance, now interest to their ecological role in terrestrial ecosystems is growing.
Currently, the main areas of research on viruses in terrestrial ecosystems include
- viruses of medical, veterinary, and agricultural importance causing...
Biodiversity losses in agricultural landscapes are a well-known problem in ecology, and widely discussed in society. They are largely caused by shifts in farming practices over the past century, including the loss of semi-natural habitat, the increased use of agrochemicals, and changes in the timing and frequency of crop management actions. However, different species are impacted in different...
As the globe is experiencing an increasing number of crises, the work of scientists – inter alia at iDiv – d becomes increasingly challenging. We want to understand the world: how species behave, how ecosystems work, and how we humans affect all this. We want our work to be valued and want to be approached for our knowleddge, yet we also have the urge to help address some key elements of the...
Partitioning biomass and functions such as effective separation between leaf (green part) from floral part of plant communities allows a more accurate estimation of photosynthetic vs. reproductive investment. Particularly facing the rise in global temperatures due to climate change, plant communities alter their metabolism, growth, and gas exchange, ultimately affecting functional traits....
Bird diversity, community composition and functional diversity in temperate forests are typically studied during the breeding season, yet bird communities change throughout the year. To support forest management that considers bird populations year-round, we need a better understanding of how environmental factors shape avian diversity across all seasons.
In this study, we monitored bird...
Rewilding has emerged as a prominent strategy for ecological restoration in Europe, yet public support remains uneven and shaped by political values. As debates surrounding the Nature Restoration Law intensify, understanding how political identity influences support for rewilding is increasingly vital. We present findings from a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted in the Oder Delta, a...
Human-induced climate change threatens global biodiversity, with the impact of extreme weather events (EWEs) on species still unclear. We introduce a framework to assess the effects of EWEs on species. As a case study, we use occupancy models for 132 German bird species of conservation concern, using monthly weather and remote sensing data from 2000 to 2022. The models predict species...
The dispersal potential of pollen influences gene flow within and between plant populations impacting on processes such as local adaptation, speciation and long-term survival of metapopulations. However, our knowledge on physiological trade-offs (e.g. pollen size, pollen density, vegetative resources, etc.) that impact pollen dispersal are yet limited, since conventional dispersal...
LiDAR-based forest monitoring provides a powerful means of capturing tree structure at high spatial resolution, yet quantitative morphometric analyses of individual tree shapes remain underexplored. Using a published LiDAR dataset covering forest plots in Southern Germany, we extracted 200 annotated point cloud renderings of individual trees from eight species, segmented with a...
In this paper we analyze the role of social norms regarding sustainable agricultural produce and nature protection in sustainable behavior. For this purpose, we conduct a survey and two experiments, a discrete choice experiment and a dictator game, with a representative sample of German residents. In a second data collection we test the effect of an information intervention – using information...
To understand the impact of climate change on plant communities, ecologists often rely on historical baseline data on biodiversity across biomes and its relationship with the climatic environment. Predictions of changes in plant communities under ongoing climate change are often based on monthly bioclimatic variables, such as those provided by the WorldClim datasets, at relatively coarse...
Understanding biodiversity and applying this knowledge for positive impact relies on access to reliable data with broad geographic and taxonomic coverage. Data on species abundances are particularly valuable for documenting trends over time or community effects, and whilst a wealth of such information exists, much is neither interoperable nor readily usable. We have recently implemented a...
Social-ecological transformation is needed to face today´s global envionmental and socio-economic changes without loosing essential parts of biodiversity. However, the initiation, promotion and support of social-ecological transformation for the conservation and restoration of biodiversity still needs to be further explored. In this study, 22 projects and processes were analysed in Germany...
Gross Primary Production (GPP), the gross uptake of CO2 by vegetation, represents the largest carbon flux in terrestrial ecosystems and is fundamental to understanding global carbon dynamics. While Eddy Covariance (EC) towers provide direct, high-frequency estimates of GPP, their global spatial coverage remains limited. When there is an absence of EC data, remote sensing (RS) techniques are...
Taxonomic description patterns illustrate how the rate of new descriptions within taxonomic groups changes over time. This study combines description dates, phylogenetic information, and author numbers for all eukaryotic life on Earth from LifeGate, alongside occurrences from GBIF, public interest data from the Biodiversity in Literature project, and habitat preferences and body size data from...
The new EU sustainability reporting requirements require companies to evaluate and reveal their impact on nature, in particular on biodiversity, as well as the associated risks and opportunities. While these regulations aim to promote accountability and environmental responsibility, they pose significant challenges for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which often lack the necessary...
Insect outbreaks significantly affect forest composition, carbon and nutrient cycling, and water and energy fluxes. Functional diversity within forest communities may mitigate insect disturbance impacts by reducing host tree dominance and constraining insect population growth.
To investigate biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships under insect pressure, we conducted a series...
Fragmentation of terrestrial and freshwater habitats produces negative impacts to wildlife populations, plant community persistence and overall ecosystem function. Preserving connectivity between crucial habitat areas and across large landscapes is vital to sustain biodiversity during ongoing anthropogenic global change. Identifying key ecological corridors at spatial extents large enough to...
Investigating climate niche properties of plant species is, in face of climate change, of great interest, especially to predict their future distribution or their response to future conditions. The fitting of climate niche requires both reliable climatic variables and distribution data. Most of the studies use distribution data from the well-known open access Global Biodiversity Information...
The Caatinga, a seasonally dry tropical forest in northeastern Brazil, remains one of the most understudied biomes in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. To address this gap, the BrazilDry Experiment was established to explore how tree species richness, functional composition, and facilitation influence microclimate and contribute to ecosystem restoration and resilience against...
Oil palm is the world’s main source of edible oil, supporting rural incomes but also driving deforestation and other impacts. As new production regions emerge, understanding the links between sustainability and governance— ranging from government regulations to market demands —is essential. We examined Peru’s oil palm sector, focusing on the main producing Regions, San Martin and Ucayali. We...
In many cultures worldwide, the use of psychedelics is an integral part of spiritual practices. Psychedelics are suggested to increase mental wellbeing, while their potential for improving nature and social connectedness as part of spiritual wellbeing is an emerging research area.
With this cross-sectional survey based on 212 participants, we assessed whether experiences with natural and...
Primary Biological Aerosol Particles (PBAPs) are airborne materials of biological origin, comprising viable and non-viable entities such as bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, spores, pollen, subcellular fragments, and plant/animal detritus (Després et al., 2012). Emitted directly from the biosphere into the atmosphere, PBAPs can undergo short- or long-range atmospheric transport. Their...
Leaf traits are key indicators of ecosystem functioning and vary not only between species but also within species and within individuals. However, within-individual variation is often neglected due to measurement limitations. Light availability, influenced by surrounding vegetation, is a major driver of leaf trait variability, especially across the strong vertical light gradients found in...
The phyllosphere of temperate trees is a dynamic environment and undergoes phenological changes throughout the growing season. However, the key drivers of phyllosphere microbiome dynamics are still poorly understood. Following bacterial community composition and throughfall-mediated bacterial transport for oak (Quercus robur L.), ash (Fraxinus excelsior L.) and linden (Tilia cordata...
During times of unprecedented biodiversity loss, understanding biodiversity ecosystem-functioning (BEF) relationships is essential to mitigate the consequences. One well-established observation is that the effect of biodiversity on ecosystem functions strengthens over time. A proposed explanation for this pattern is the increase of trait dissimilarity between co-occuring species, which results...
As climate change progresses, drought events are becoming more frequent, and water scarcity is increasingly affecting plant productivity and survival. Plants access water through their root systems, which involve various root economic traits related to belowground resource acquisition. Therefore, it is critical to study the role of key root traits involved in water uptake—such as root system...
One third of the world's population suffers from pollen-induced respiratory allergies. For those affected, knowing the local pollen loads and thus the local risk of allergy symptoms is of the utmost importance for their daily life and medication. However, real data on pollen abundance needs to combine knowledge of flowering times, pollen release and ultimately local pollen occurrence, and this...
Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) and Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) are best provided as spatiotemporal data. When these data are structured on regular spatial and temporal grids, they are known as Analysis Ready Data Cubes (ARDCs). Recent developments in the Earth observation community have led to broad adoption of ARDCs, facilitated by cloud-native data formats that support...
Herbaceous dominated ecosystems – including grasslands, savannas, and shrublands — cover almost half of earth’s terrestrial land surface and play a key role in carbon sequestration. Understanding how they maintain productivity under environmental stress is crucial for climate mitigation. Recent evidence from forests suggests that conservative species outperform fast-growing ones under...
Crises such as wars, inflation, pandemics, climate change and migration leave only minor and peripheral attention to biodiversity loss, despite its existential threat to humanity and all other living beings. PrioDiv, a new iDiv Flexpool project, aims to examine to what extent biodiversity is prioritised in decision-making processes during times of multiple crises in fine terms and how this...
Metabarcoding is a versatile, powerful and widely used tool for the identification of taxonomic entities, uncovering hidden diversity, assessment of community composition in space and time, elucidating species interactions and food webs, and biodiversity changes. Last year, the Support Unit iBarc was established which provides direct access to metabarcoding services, starting from project...
Soil sustains life beyond water and forms the foundation of terrestrial ecosystems. Our project aims to deepen the understanding of soil stability and its pivotal role in biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF). We specifically focus on the multidimensional intra- and inter-annual stability of soil properties.
This research is conducted within the framework of the Jena Experiment, where...
Manual microscopic analyses are generally considered the gold standard for various palynological applications. However, in recent years, automated, database-supported methods for pollen analysis are increasingly being used. These approaches are considered to be more cost-effective, less time-consuming and enable better reproducibility than conventional microscope-based methods.
One example...
SEED-DarkDivNet is an add-on in the DarkDivNet and started in February 2020. DarkDivNet is a global network across 119 regions that aims to better understand the mechanisms underlying the absence of species that could potentially occur at a given site, i.e. the dark diversity. SEED-DarkDivNet aims at empirically testing how species belonging to the dark diversity can establish based on their...
Mammals underwent a taxonomic and morphological adaptive radiation across the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary. Morphological adaptations to the jaw, relating to disparate feeding ecologies, have been shown to increase in disparity during the Cenozoic. Mammal body mass also increases across the K/Pg boundary and is intrinsically linked to many aspects of a mammal’s ecological niche,...
The ongoing biodiversity crisis necessitates rapid and comprehensive assessments of global species inventories which is hampered by the slow pace of species discovery and formal taxonomic description. Recent advances in machine learning hold much promise for fast-tracking species delimitation and integrative taxonomic approaches yet their applicability in taxonomically complex groups remains...
The research group of Biodiversity of the Atmosphere focuses on the study of bioaerosols and investigates the effect of abiotic factors, such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed, on their concentration, composition, and dispersion.
Bioaerosols, biological particles such as bacteria, pollen, viruses, fungal spores, and more, that are released from the biosphere into the...
