Conveners
Biodiversity Change
- Daniela Hoss (Uni Leipzig, iDiv)
- Georg Johannes Albert Hähn
Biodiversity Change
- Daniela Hoss (Uni Leipzig, iDiv)
- Georg Johannes Albert Hähn
Biodiversity Change
- Georg Johannes Albert Hähn
- Daniela Hoss (Uni Leipzig, iDiv)
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,...
As pressures on biodiversity intensify, a coordinated monitoring effort across Europe is urgently needed to track spatial and temporal trends and inform policy responses. Designing effective biodiversity observation networks requires capturing a broad range of species and habitats while enabling attribution of trends to underlying environmental drivers. Using Europe as a case study, we...
Wildlife is returning to human-dominated landscapes as a result of reduced direct persecution, land abandonment, and active restorations, leading to ecological benefits such as species range expansions and the trophic rewilding of ecosystems. These recolonization processes can have important ecological and conservation benefits, not only helping to improve the conservation status of particular...
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...
Arable land undoubtedly is the most important habitat class covering >1/3 of cultural landscapes such as in Central Europe. Segetal plants can contribute substantially to biodiversity and provide food sources e.g. for insect pollinators or herbivores. However, agricultural intensification has driven a massive decline in phytodiversity over the last decades. In contrast to for example meadows...
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...
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...
Urbanization is a major driver of biodiversity loss, with arthropods—critical to ecosystem functioning—facing significant declines in biomass and abundance as cities expand.
Previous studies showed that while all insect groups are declining in abundance not all species are declining in regards to biomass. A variety of biotic and abiotic factors have a different impact on different species...
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,...
Mongolia is increasingly affected by climate change, particularly through rising average temperatures and altered precipitation patterns. Plant phenology, which is highly sensitive to these climatic factors, serves as an important indicator of ecological responses to climate change. While remote sensing studies have revealed a lengthening of the growing season - marked by earlier onset and...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Soil biodiversity is crucial for ecosystem functioning, yet its high spatial variability makes characterization difficult. Monitoring microbial diversity requires spatially explicit sampling strategies that incorporate ecological principles such as distance decay into their design. We present findings from the SpaceMic project within the framework of the German Biodiversity Exploratories,...
Anthropogenic activities are driving dramatic biodiversity loss that reverberates to the functioning of ecosystems. Correlative observations and artificially assembled communities have been the primary methods to study how ecosystem functioning responds to species loss. However, the most direct way to test the consequences of species loss on ecosystem functions is by experimentally removing...
Insect pollinators play a vital role in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem functions via their interactions with plants. Standardized monitoring methods capturing plant-pollinator interactions are therefore indispensable to create effective conservation strategies, in the face of accelerating global biodiversity loss. Traditional monitoring methods are often limited in their temporal and...
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...
