Speaker
Description
Plants encode local environmental conditions through their species composition and ecological indicator values, making them powerful bioindicators of ecosystem state. Plant functional traits, in turn, reflect physiology, form, and function. Leveraging millions of crowd-sensed plant observations from automated plant identification and citizen science platforms (e.g. Flora Incognita, iNaturalist, Pl@ntNet, Observation.org, and additional data integrated via GBIF), we combine bioindicators and functional traits into a scalable inference layer that links biodiversity to vegetation, environmental conditions, and ecosystem functioning across spatial scales.
We first show that crowd-sensed plants act as living sensors enabling high-resolution mapping of urban climate and soil conditions across Europe based on more than 80 million observations from 326 cities. Beyond the urban heat island effect, vegetation reveals strong and consistent contrasts between built-up and green areas in moisture, light availability, soil pH, salinity, and disturbance. These within-city gradients are comparable in magnitude to differences observed between cities separated by thousands of kilometers. While built-up areas exhibit strong environmental homogenization across Europe, urban forests retain substantial environmental heterogeneity relevant for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
Building on this biodiversity-based environmental sensing framework, we extend crowd-sensed plant observations to eddy covariance flux tower research. We introduce FloraFlux, a community-driven initiative integrating automated plant identification into ICOS and FLUXNET networks providing eddy covariance measurements of carbon, water, and energy fluxes. Plant observations are linked to functional traits from the TRY database, ecological indicator values for climate, soil, and disturbance, and eddy covariance flux measurements to investigate how biodiversity mediates ecosystem responses to environmental drivers. First exploratory analyses reveal strong relationships between maximum net ecosystem productivity (i.e. 95th percentile of NEP) and plant-derived indicators of soil nitrogen and functional composition.
Together, these results demonstrate that crowd-sensed plant observations provide a scalable biodiversity sensing layer that links biodiversity, environmental conditions, plant traits, and ecosystem functioning across ecosystems and domains.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
|---|---|
| FOR TALKS: Poster Presentation Option | No, I prefer to present only as a talk. |