iDiv Annual Conference 2026

8 Sept 2026, 08:00 → 9 Sept 2026, 19:30 Europe/Berlin

Aletta Bonn, Markus Römermann

Dear iDiv community,

We are pleased to invite you to the 10th iDiv Annual Conference, which will take place on 08 - 09 September 2026 at the Friedrich Schiller University. This year marks a special milestone, as it is the first time the conference is hosted in Jena.

The iDiv Annual Conference brings together iDiv scientists from all locations of the consortium and across all career stages. It provides an interactive forum for scientific exchange with colleagues you know well, and an opportunity to establish new contacts and collaborations within iDiv.

 

Contributions to the conference will be organized according to the five iDiv research topics, with the final session format and programme to be confirmed by the end of April. Please refer to the programme section for any updates.

 

We hope to welcome you in September at the conference!
 

Yours, the iDiv Conference Organizing Committee
Aletta Bonn and Markus Römermann (Conference Chairs)

Robert Rauschkolb, Michael Gerth, Maria Méndez, Aleksandra Pienkowska, Anne Christine de la Vega-Leinert, Anton Potatov, Brigitte Braschler (Scientific Committee), supported by Kati Kietzmann & Ronja Wodner of the Public Relations Team

Tuesday 8 September

Bus Shuttle Service

Registration & Welcome Coffee

Conference Opening & Keynote

Conveners: Aletta Bonn (Helmholtz-Center for Environmental Research - UFZ / German Centre for integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) / Friedrich Schiller University Jena), Markus Bernhardt-Römermann (FSU Jena, Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution)

1 Paleo-and Macroecological Perspectives on Biodiversity Dynamics and Recovery in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is marked by profound biodiversity change, yet understanding its consequences and charting pathways to recovery requires perspectives that extend far beyond the recent past. Drawing on paleo- and macroecology, this talk explores how deep-time baselines and large-scale ecological patterns reframe our understanding of current biodiversity dynamics — including the long human legacy reaching back to Pleistocene megafauna extinctions and the lessons that past climate change offers for anticipating ongoing and future climate-driven transformations. A further key theme is community saturation and large-scale biodiversity dynamics in the context of biotic globalization, where the global spread of alien species raises fundamental questions about ecological resistance, novel species interactions, and the meaning of nativeness in a rapidly changing biosphere. Together, these perspectives reveal that today's ecosystems are deeply novel yet carry the imprint of millions of years of evolutionary and ecological history — a duality with profound implications for conservation and restoration. I will argue that paleo- and macroecological insights are essential for setting meaningful targets, guiding transformative action, and steering biodiversity dynamics toward more positive outcomes in the Anthropocene.

Speaker: Mr Jens-Christian Svenning (Aarhus University)

11:30 Short Break: Room Transition & Grab a Coffee

Morning Sessions: Approaches

Conveners: Marius Munschek (iDiv), Stefan Knauß

2 The Hidden Costs of Climate Change Tracking: How Climate Velocity and Movement Energetics Shape Connectivity Across European Protected Areas

Rapid climate change is undermining the long-term capacity of protected areas (PAs) to conserve biodiversity, yet exposure metrics alone cannot reveal whether species can realistically reach areas where suitable climates may persist. Here, we develop a climate-informed connectivity framework that integrates climate velocity, PA climatic residence time, PA size, and functional connectivity based on energetics-informed resistance surfaces derived from species distribution models. Using high-resolution climate projections and omnidirectional connectivity modelling across Europe, we identify where climate-tracking movement is more or less feasible under combined climatic and energetic constraints. We show that opportunities for redistribution are substantially more limited and spatially uneven than structural connectivity alone suggests. Small, climate-exposed PAs are especially vulnerable because they provide limited internal climatic buffering and are often embedded in landscapes where movement feasibility is low. By contrast, larger and more climatically stable PAs are more often situated within landscapes that can better support redistribution. Our results show that the effectiveness of PA networks under climate change depends not only on the location of climatic refugia, but also on PA size and the energetic permeability of the surrounding landscape. Our study provides a spatially explicit basis for restoration and conservation planning to maintain the functionality of PA networks under future climate change

Speaker: Gavin Stark (iDiv/MLU)

3 Despite population declines, energy demand has remained broadly stable in North American bird communities

Bird communities are fundamental to ecosystem functioning, yet how their community reorganisation under global change affects ecosystem energetics remains poorly understood. Using 58 years of North American Breeding Bird Survey data from 5,870 routes (1966-2023), we tracked co-variation among species richness, abundance, community evenness, and community-level energy demand. Total abundance declined sharply while species richness remained stable, producing increasingly even communities. Counterintuitively, community-level energy demand did not decline in parallel; instead, it remained broadly stable, sustained by a compensatory rise in mean body mass and trophic level driven by increasing numbers of vertebrate specialists. A strong empirical coupling between per-individual energy demand and abundance underlies this stability, revealing a functionally critical community reorganisation invisible to conventional diversity metrics.

Speaker: Daria Lipsky (iDiv)

4 BirdFutures: A Scalable Framework for Ecological Foresight Using Birds as Indicators of Biodiversity

Biodiversity is undergoing rapid decline driven by anthropogenic pressures and climate change. Addressing this trend has become a global imperative, with growing emphasis on the need to bend the curve of biodiversity loss. To effectively mitigate these changes, it is essential to improve our capacity to anticipate future biodiversity trajectories in order to plan and implement appropriate conservation measures. Birds represent particularly valuable indicators of biodiversity as they occupy multiple trophic levels and functional niches, and they have been shown to be highly sensitive to environmental change. Bird distributions are structured across multiple spatial and temporal scales, necessitating modelling approaches that explicitly incorporate hierarchical and multi-scale ecological processes. In the BirdFutures project, we leverage a systematically collected, long-term dataset of bird observations spanning more than 30 years across Germany to generate forecasts of bird diversity and distributions into the future. In addition, we explore alternative future scenarios through co-development with stakeholders from conservation, agriculture, finance, and other relevant sectors. These scenario-based “what-if” pathways provide critical foresight into how land-use and climate decisions may shape future biodiversity outcomes. Our modelling framework builds on a meta-model approach developed by Wiedenroth et al., integrating multi-scale species distribution models that incorporate environmental and habitat predictors at ecologically relevant scales for birds. This framework combines continental-scale climate data with fine-resolution habitat and landscape variables to improve predictive performance across scales. The long-term objective of this work is to develop a flexible, non-static modelling system capable of scaling across spatial resolutions and data availability. This approach will enable application beyond Germany to broader European contexts, supporting more robust ecological forecasting and decision-making under global change.

Speaker: Lisa Hildebrand (iDiv Halle-Jena Leipzig & Department of Ecological Modelling, Helmholtz UFZ)

5 The influence of frost tolerance on the flowering phenology of herbaceous plants – field study in botanical gardens

With ongoing climate change, many plants are responding to changes in CO2 levels and temperatures. It was shown that frost events may become more frequent even with a general rise in temperature. In response, plants may shift their spring phenology to earlier dates and/or their range towards the poles and to higher elevations. Frost can become a potential risk for plant survival and performance, and frost resistance might be an important driver of the ability of plant species to change their phenology and range.
However, this has not been studied yet. We measured frost resistance in herbaceous plant species using the electrolyte leakage method. By sampling data in seven botanical gardens distributed over Europe located in five different climate zones, we can examine FR and phenological shifts in species including their local adaptions in regards of FR and phenology. Thereby we assume that 1) a species’ ability to shift their spring phenology to earlier dates is driven by their ability to tolerate late frost events, as shifts without high frost resistance will lead to frost damage. And 2) species’ ability to shift their distributional range towards the poles and higher elevational sites is driven by their ability to tolerate late-frost events, as the likelihood of late-frost events increases with these shifts. 3) FR of the same species differ between the locations as the temperature is influencing the FR of plant species leading to local adaptions. Results will be presented at the conference.

Speaker: Therese Ziegler

6 Towards causal inference for biodiversity science: an island biogeography case study

Biodiversity varies in response to natural and anthropogenic drivers. Yet, most analytical tools for quantifying driver impact remain correlational, irrespective of the sophistication of the underlying statistical methodology. Unfortunately, at present, few patterns in biodiversity science have been subject to robust causal analyses, leaving even well-studied empirical patterns victim to opaque interpretations. Here we develop a causal modelling framework for one of biodiversity’s oldest questions: what generates the island species-area relationship (ISAR) in island biogeography? We encode the causal structure of island assembly in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and build a phylogenetically-informed generative model that explicitly separates two scales: lineage colonization of archipelagos, and within-archipelago species’ occurrence on individual islands. Stage 1 models colonization of 32 archipelagos for terrestrial birds as a function of isolation, area, and age; stage 2 models species’ occurrence on islands as a function of island area. The ISAR emerges as a derived relationship defined by the causal question and data generating process, not from a regression applied to emergent phenomena. The two-stage architecture reveals how passive sampling operates across scales. At the archipelago scale, larger source pools increase colonization probability, determining which lineages enter the regional pool available to colonize islands. At the island scale, the size of the filtered pool sets the expected richness of a reference island (ISAR intercept), and area governs how richness scales with island area from that baseline, generating the ISAR slope. Our framework results in a causally derived ISAR slope lower than many classical estimates that conflate these processes, a discrepancy with direct implications for how species-area theory is applied to habitat loss and fragmentation. By anchoring inference to an explicit DAG, the framework clarifies what can be identified from observational data, and points toward the causal infrastructure needed to estimate intervention effects for biodiversity science.

Speaker: Shane Blowes

7 How long is long enough? Capturing long-term dynamics with trends

Understanding biodiversity change often relies on estimating temporal trends to quantify the direction and magnitude of population and community change. These trend estimates shape our conclusions about which assemblages are changing most rapidly and guide conservation decisions about where limited resources should be directed. Yet some populations and communities that appear to follow directional trends over a decade or two may, given more time, return toward a stable mean, reflecting underlying regulatory processes rather than irreversible change. Distinguishing such mean reverting dynamics from genuinely persistent change requires time series that are long enough to reveal whether apparent trends are transient fluctuations or components of long term trajectories. A critical question that therefore speaks to the robustness of biodiversity-change inferences is what length of time series is necessary to ensure that estimated trends reliably reflect long term dynamics rather than short term noise. Here, we first demonstrate a general approach to addressing this question using simulated time series, and then explore applications to empirical data for birds, freshwater fishes, invertebrates, and trees. These analyses provide a theoretically and empirically grounded basis for judging whether existing time series are long enough to support inferences about long term dynamics with trends, and offer practical benchmarks for designing future biodiversity monitoring programs.

Speaker: Kimberly Thompson (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) / Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

Morning Sessions: Complexity

Conveners: Michael Gerth (German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig & Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), Robert Rauschkolb (Friedrich Schiller University, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP) Jena)

8 Global patterns of soil beta diversity across multiple taxonomic groups

Soil harbors a substantial proportion of global biodiversity, yet its large-scale biogeographic patterns remain poorly understood. Previous studies have primarily focused on local diversity (i.e. alpha diversity) within individual soil taxonomic groups, whereas global patterns of community turnover across sites (i.e., beta diversity) remains largely unexplored. To address this knowledge gap, we synthesized global datasets of community assembly in different soil taxonomic groups spanning a broad range of body sizes including earthworm, collembola, nematodes, protists, fungi, and bacteria. We examined how beta diversity varies with absolute latitude and assessed the relative importance of climatic, edaphic, habitat, anthropogenic, and elevational drivers. In parallel, we also evaluated large-scale patterns of alpha and gamma diversity. We found contrasting latitudinal patterns of beta diversity among taxonomic groups. Specifically, beta diversity of protists and nematodes declined with absolute latitude, consistent with the patterns commonly observed in aboveground organisms, while fungal and bacterial beta diversity tended to increase toward higher latitude. Across taxonomic groups, climatic variables consistently emerged as the primary drivers of biodiversity across spatial scales. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating multiple taxonomic groups to develop a more comprehensive understanding of global soil biodiversity patterns. Furthermore, our results suggest that ongoing climate change could substantially reshape soil communities worldwide.

Speaker: Pubin Hong (iDiv)

9 Does soil diversity shape microbial and nutrient responses to pollen deposition?

Pollen deposition may be a major but overlooked seasonal nutrient input to forest soils. Wind-pollinated trees can release up to 4000 kg/ha of nutrient-rich pollen, most of which is deposited onto soil rather than reaching stigmas (Greenfield et al., 1996). Yet, its effects on soil microbial physiology and nutrient dynamics remain poorly understood. An additional layer of complexity arises from the strong physicochemical heterogeneity of forest soils, which is likely to modulate the magnitude and direction of pollen effects.
Here, we test the hypothesis that pollen acts as a staged nutrient input, with early leaching followed by sustained microbial nutrient release from complex pollen material. We further hypothesize that the magnitude and direction of these effects depend on soil properties, with stronger responses expected in high C:N soils and additional modulation by pH, texture and aggregate stability. To address these questions, we incubated ten temperate forest soils spanning contrasting physicochemical properties with Quercus robur pollen in a microcosm experiment. Unamended soils and soils amended with glucose-C plus inorganic N, P and K served as controls to separate pollen-specific effects from general nutrient addition. We followed microbial respiration, microbial biomass, hydrolytic enzyme activities and nutrient dynamics across pollen degradation phases. These responses are linked to soil properties using mixed-effects models and multivariate analyses to identify factors controlling soil sensitivity to pollen deposition.
By addressing pollen as an overlooked seasonal nutrient pulse, this study provides new insight into how plant reproductive phenology can influence belowground microbial functioning and nutrient cycling across diverse forest soils. This perspective may become increasingly relevant as global change alters forest composition, phenology and pollen production (Trumbore et al., 2015; Baldrian et al., 2023).

Speaker: Aleksandra Pienkowska (iDiv; UFZ)

10 Can we witness symbiont evolution within a human lifetime?

Symbionts are widespread across ecosystems and play fundamental roles in host biology. Over evolutionary time, some symbionts shift from one host species to another, where they must survive, transmit, and adapt to a novel host environment. However, we still have a limited understanding of how symbionts establish in new hosts, how rapidly they adapt, and how their effects on host fitness change during this process.
Here, we used Spiroplasma, a maternally transmitted bacterial symbiont found in approximately 10% of insect species, as a model to study symbiont evolution during host shifts. Using an experimental evolution approach, we transinfected Spiroplasma into novel Drosophila hosts and maintained replicated host–symbiont lines for 35 host generations under constant temperature and humidity. To assess changes in symbiont adaptation, we compared host fitness-related traits at the beginning and end of the experiment, including fecundity, longevity, and protection against parasitoid wasps.
To link phenotypic changes with genomic evolution, we performed in-house whole-genome sequencing using both Nanopore and Illumina platforms and analysed genetic variation between the ancestral symbiont population and symbionts coevolved in novel hosts. As Spiroplasma is imperfectly transmitted from mother to offspring, we also quantified symbiont density and vertical transmission rate across host generations. Together, these data allow us to track how a symbiont transfers into a novel host, establishes within host populations, and potentially adapts over experimentally observable timescales.
This study asks whether symbiont evolution, often considered over deep evolutionary time, can be directly observed within a human lifetime.

Speaker: Pratyaksh Singh (Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, and German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany)

11 The role of Wolbachia symbionts in solitary bees: protectors or nurturers?

Many insect species harbour intracellular symbiotic bacteria that are passed on from mothers to offspring. These symbionts employ various strategies that enhance their proliferation, which may impact the host’s fitness in multiple ways. Wolbachia is a common facultative endosymbiont of arthropods but is especially frequent in bees an ecologically important group of pollinators. The reason for its success in this particular group of insects is unclear. We here explore two alternative, not mutually exclusive roles Wolbachia may play in bees. First, we determined if Wolbachia may block viral infections in bees, as has been described for other hosts. We sampled hundreds of bee individuals from three common species for which we characterized the virome, and determined viral and Wolbachia loads. We found no conclusive evidence for Wolbachia influencing viral titres in bees. Second, we used comparative genomics across a wide range of Wolbachia strains to identify potential signatures for nutritional supplementation by the symbiont. This revealed that unlike in most other hosts, Wolbachia in bees is able to synthesize biotin, which may be supplemented to the host. This ability has at least two independent origins in bee Wolbachia which were facilitated by mobile genetic element transfer into the symbiont’s genome. Our data suggests that the ability to produce biotin is a major reason for Wolbachia’s success in many solitary bee species. Furthermore, we observe that biotin provisioning by facultative symbionts may be required for specialised solitary bees that rely on a single plant species as only nutritional source. Overall, our data highlight nutritional supplementation as a potentially common, but so far overlooked mechanism of symbiont spreading in arthropod species.

Speaker: Michael Gerth (German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig & Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

12 How are the oak-Scleroderma ectomycorrhiza and associated bacteria affected by drought and its legacy?

Temperate forests provide vital ecosystem services, but foundation species such as the European pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) are under increasing threat from extreme drought. The PhytOakmeter project studies how clonal oak trees and their associated microbiomes respond to, acclimate to, and eventually adapt to water limitations. Tree water and nutrient uptake are enhanced by ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi and their associated bacteria. However, the regulatory crosstalk between plant and fungal gene expression and the mycorrhizosphere community remains unclear.
This report details a two-year open-top greenhouse experiment using oak forest sandy loam to investigate the effects of drought and their legacy. We isolated the dominant oak ECM formed with Scleroderma sp. for RNA sequencing analysis, and characterized the associated bacteria using 16S metabarcoding and phenotypic testing of cultured isolates. Following an initial drought, the oaks were better able to sustain growth during a consecutive drought. Both drought and its legacy impacted the bacterial beta diversity associated with Scleroderma ECM. Specific taxa (Sphingobacteriaceae, Nocardiodaceae, and Propionibacteriaceae) were enriched by both drought and its legacy, whereas Xanthobacteraceae responded only to consecutive drought. The bacterial collection included Proteobacteria, Firmicutes and Actinobacteria that tolerated drought and exhibited various plant-beneficial traits. We will also present how oak and Scleroderma gene expression mirrored the impact of drought and its legacy.
This study highlights the importance of drought in shaping the composition of prokaryotic communities in ectomycorrhizal roots, and in modulating fungal and plant gene expression. Furthermore, it suggests that ectomycorrhiza-directed bacterial culture collections could provide microbiomes adapted to drought that could support host trees during reforestation at stressful sites.
Link: https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb17/phytoakmeter

Speaker: Erik Teutloff (Department of Agroecosystems, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Halle (Saale), 06120, Germany)

13 Specificity of foliar fungal endophyte communities in subtropical forests

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 tree diversity gradient. The aim of this study is to elucidate the composition of fungal communities in the phyllosphere of shrubs, which are considered phytometers of the surrounding tree neighbourhood which reflect the tree diversity in the local neighbourhood, and to disentangle the underlying drivers, such as direct spillover effects of microbes from heterospecific neighbours. Using leaf-surface sterilization followed by next-generation sequencing we analysed phyllosphere fungal communities and calculated host preference of each Amplicon Sequence Variant (ASV) using the phi (Φ) coefficient. We expected [H1] generalists and specialists to be more frequent among epiphytes and endophytes, respectively. Furthermore, we hypothesized that [H2] fungal alpha diversity of our shrub phytometers is higher in mixed compared to mono-specific tree neighbourhoods. Finally, we expected that [H3] shrubs growing in the understory catch endophytic fungi, with a higher probability of spillover depending on the degree of specialization of the fungal taxa. There was evidence in support of all our three hypotheses, which reveals the complex interplay of specialist and generalist fungi in shrub phyllosphere community assembly. In consequence, the biotic and abiotic environment might play a more important role than host species identity alone.

Speaker: Tibor Drost (Martin Luther University Halle Wittenberg, Institute of Biology / Geobotany and Botanical Garden, Halle (Saale), DE; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, DE)

Morning Sessions: Functions

Conveners: Pia Loeffke (iDiv, EIE), Qing-Fang Bi (Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry)

14 Tree mycorrhizal type shapes seasonal soil microbial growth and resource acquisition strategies

In forest ecosystems, tree diversity and associated mycorrhiza types greatly shape microbial activity and functioning by altering resource availability and interactions among trees, mycorrhizal fungi, and microbial communities. However, the extent to which tree- mycorrhizal interactions regulate microbial growth and resource use strategies across seasons remains poorly understood. Using the MyDiv experiment, a 10-year temperate forest biodiversity platform, we examined the response of microbial physiological properties and extracellular enzyme activities to a gradient of tree diversity (1, 2, and 4 species) and mycorrhizal associations (arbuscular mycorrhizal, AM; ectomycorrhizal, EM; and mixed, AM+EM) in spring and autumn 2025. We found that tree diversity and mycorrhizal type independently affected microbial physiology. Specifically, tree diversity enhanced microbial biomass and DNA synthesis rate, but did not significantly alter carbon use efficiency (CUE). Seasonality had a strong effect on microbial physiological properties, with total microbial growth, respiration, and uptake increasing 1.5- to 3-fold from spring to autumn. These seasonal responses were particularly pronounced in EM-associated plots, which exhibited significantly larger microbial uptake, respiration, and DNA-based growth in autumn compared to AM-associated plots, while maintaining relatively stable CUE. Extracellular enzyme activities further revealed contrasting microbial nutrient-acquisition strategies between mycorrhizal systems. AM-associated soils showed greater investment in β-glucosidase targeting labile carbon substrates, while EM-associated soils exhibited higher nitrogen-acetylglucosaminidase activities. Notably, the maintenance of relatively stable CUE in EM-associated soils despite higher metabolic investment suggests that increased resource acquisition did not constrain microbial growth efficiency. Overall, our findings demonstrate that AM- and EM-associated forests support distinct seasonal microbial carbon-cycling strategies. AM systems favor rapid carbon acquisition, whereas EM systems promote seasonally intensified nutrient mining and accelerated cellular turnover without compromising growth efficiency, with potential implications for soil carbon cycling in temperate forest ecosystems.

Speaker: Dr Qing-Fang Bi

15 Influence of drier environmental conditions on fine root functional traits in beech forests

Forests cover nearly a third of Earth’s land and provide key ecosystem services. With climate change, forests face intensified drought episodes and shifting precipitation regimes. While important advances have been made to improve our understanding of tree responses to drier conditions, effects on belowground processes remain elusive, despite their importance for shaping forest functioning.
We explored how drier conditions affect key morphological and biochemical root traits linked to carbon and nitrogen dynamics in mature European beech forests distributed along a precipitation gradient in Germany. Fine roots were extracted from soil cores collected beneath mature beech trees and separated into absorptive roots (root order < 3) and transportive roots (root order > 3). Root samples were scanned and analyzed with RhizoVision Explorer to determine morphological characteristics such as root length and diameter. Samples were then dried to constant weight to assess the root biomass. Carbon and nitrogen concentrations, together with stable isotope ratios (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N), were analyzed using an elemental analyzer coupled to an isotope ratio mass spectrometer. These measurements were integrated with climatic, soil, and vegetation data provided through the ICP Forests and ICOS monitoring networks.
Clear differences were observed between absorptive and transportive roots in terms of biomass, morphology, and tissue chemistry across the precipitation gradient. Along the precipitation gradient, absorptive roots showed stronger increases in biomass density (g/m2), root length density (m/m2), and root tip and branch frequency (n/cm1) than transportive roots. In contrast, root tissue density (g/cm3) declined more markedly for absorptive roots. Both root types also exhibited increasing δ¹³C and decreasing δ¹⁵N values along the precipitation gradient.
Overall, the findings indicate that absorptive fine roots are more responsive to changes in water availability than transportive roots. These results improve understanding of belowground tree responses to a drier environment and contribute to predicting forest resilience.

Speaker: Adriana Rendon-Funes (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ))

16 Drought-induced attenuation of vertical leaves Δδ¹³C gradients in temperate tree canopies

Droughts increasingly affect the functioning of forests worldwide and compromise their capacity to mitigate climate change. Over the past decade, forests in central Europe have experienced unprecedented sequences of consecutive drought years, resulting in widespread tree mortality and substantial economic and ecological losses. In our study, we examine tree physiological responses to a series of consecutive drought episodes during the last decade, based on carbon isotope composition (δ¹³C, ‰) of leaves across the vertical canopy of trees.

In a temperate broadleaved forest in central Europe (Hohes Holz, ICOS site DE-HoH), we annually collected leaves from twigs of comparable ages between 2015 and 2024, across the whole tree canopies of dominant species at the site (Fagus sylvatica and Quercus petraea). Bulk leaf material was assessed for δ¹³C, which provides an integrated record of the ratio of intercellular to atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the period when the carbon was fixed. As such δ¹³C can be used as physiological indicator of a tree’s water status and drought stress. We present how changes in δ¹³C across tree canopies are related to meteorological and hydrological indicators, spectral measures, and leaf functional traits measured at the forest site over the last decade.

Our dataset confirms pronounced vertical δ¹³C gradients within tree canopies, and significant increases in leaf δ¹³C with declining soil water availability. More remarkably, we observe that the difference in δ¹³C between upper and lower tree canopy layers (Δδ¹³C) consistently attenuates from wetter to drier years (P<0.05). This pattern arises because the δ¹³C values of leaves in the lower canopy increase more
rapidly (i.e. become less negative) than those of upper-canopy leaves. Linear mixed-effects model outcomes confirm that the attenuation of leaf Δδ¹³C across tree canopies is primarily explained by reductions in soil moisture, with additional variation explained by leaf functional traits. Collectively, our results suggest that drought induces a homogenization of reduced stomatal aperture across the canopies of the studied tree species, enhancing our understanding of tree functional responses to
drought.

Speaker: Emily Solly (Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung GmbH - UFZ)

17 Summer drought affects autumn but not flowering phenology of herbaceous species in temperate forest understories

Most phenological studies conducted in forests have focused on tree or woody species and early-season phenology, neglecting herbaceous species and autumn phenology. This leaves a gap in the mechanistic understanding of the entire life cycle of understory communities, despite their biodiversity, structural and functional role in forests. As autumn phenology is sensitive to summer droughts, this becomes particularly important in the context of climate change.
Therefore, we here studied six phenological stages spanning the entire life cycle of 261 populations of 30 herbaceous species from three temperate forest types in a dry and a wet year. We compared the phenology of communities between forest types and between the years. We ran mixed effects models to determine which environmental cue, soil moisture, light accumulation or growing degree days (GDD), was driving phenological responses.
The phenological composition of the herbaceous understory was organised along a flowering axis and a senescence axis in multivariate space, and depended more on species than forest type. The distribution of each phenological stage across all species, particularly leaf senescence and growing season length, differed between the two years, with a more condensed distribution in the drier year. Mean values, however, did not differ substantially. Furthermore, we found differences in species rankings in autumn phenology but not in first flowering day or peak flowering. Driving environmental cues depended on the phenological stage, with peak flowering advancing the most with GDD and initial growth advancing the most with light accumulation. We conclude that the timing of leaf senescence was strongly affected by summer droughts, implying consequences for plant performance and ecosystem productivity.

Speaker: Till Deilmann (FSU Jena)

18 Short-term response of plant communities and intraspecific traits to large-scale forest disturbance

Post-disturbance forest sites represent a mosaic of microclimates depending on deadwood and understory characteristics. At the same time, early-successional plant communities vary in their species and functional composition. However, how fine-scale microclimatic variation drives trait patterns in this context remains insufficiently explored. Here, we quantified the short-term effect of microclimate on bootstrapped community-level plant functional traits. Additionally, we compared intraspecific leaf trait variability in the most frequent species Avenella flexuosa. Our experiment consists of intact forest stands and three post-disturbance treatments: salvage logging, high stump retention, and snag island retention (total n = 79) across lower Mountain ranges in Central Europe. We surveyed herbaceous plants in 0.79 m² plots. We measured vegetative height, specific leaf area (SLA), and leaf dry matter content (LDMC) for each species with cover > 3% and up to 3 individuals per species. TMS-4 dataloggers at the plot center were used to continuously measure soil moisture and temperatures. We assess the role of microclimate changes as important drivers of trait variability. We further evaluate whether changes in microclimate affect plant functional traits more strongly via intraspecific variability than species turnover in species-poor early-successional communities. Our results show increasing LDMC values from intact stands to salvage logging plots, indicating plasticity in response to light availability. In conclusion, our results emphasize the need for site-specific trait measurements to accurately reveal the impacts of environmental change and to link traits to ecosystem functions.

Speaker: Florian Steinebrunner (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

19 Hugging trees - A refined look at physical tree-tree interactions

Tree-tree interactions have been identified as a key mechanism linking biodiversity to ecosystem functioning. The complementary occupation of canopy space by coexisting species increases canopy packing and promotes community productivity. Several studies have applied the theoretical volumetric complementarity approach using the crown complementarity index (CCI). While effective at quantifying vertical stratification, this approach does not account for the distance between trees or the volume of interacting crowns.
To address these gaps, we developed the crown overlap index (COI) based on existing concepts of crown overlap and distance weighting. The index quantifies the volume of crown interactions within a distance threshold derived from 3D laser scanning point cloud data. We calculated both CCI and COI for 115 tree pairs within the BEF-China experiment and found a negative relationship between the two indices. At high CCI values, COI was consistently low, whereas at lower CCI values COI showed considerable variation. This indicates that canopy complementarity cannot be fully captured by a single spatial index alone.
To demonstrate the ecological utility of the COI, we investigated its response and that of the CCI to leaf functional trait dissimilarity as well as dissimilarity in the amount of tree structural complexity. We could show contrasting effects, with CCI showing weak significant effects towards the trait dissimilarity and a strong correlation with the dissimilarity in structural complexity. The COI reacted inversely, with a marginal effect of leaf trait dissimilarity and a significant relationship with structural complexity dissimilarity.
In conclusion, the crown overlap index as a refined spatial metric of physical tree-tree interactions could be very useful for research questions regarding the influence of structural crown interactions, such as biotic interactions between trees and organisms interacting with and on them.

Speaker: Alexander Täuber (Technical University Dresden, DE; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, DE)

Lunch Break & Poster Session

20 Automated analysis of environmental samples for large-scale pollen monitoring

Allergic diseases represent a significant global health concern, with the prevalence of allergic rhinitis estimated at approximately 10–30% among adults and around 40% among children (Pawankar et al. 2013). Pollen constitutes one of the predominant factors associated with allergic rhinitis (Pawankar et al. 2013).
Air quality monitoring, particularly with a focus on pollen loads, is currently only possible to a limited extent. Limitations exist both in the spatial and temporal resolution of sampling and in the accuracy of qualitative and quantitative analyses of environmental samples.

Precise classification of pollen loads and particle types is still predominantly performed in a time-delayed manner through manual evaluation of traditional pollen trap samples by trained personnel.

The large number of samples generated in large-scale monitoring networks cannot be handled by manual evaluation alone. Therefore, we are developing a modular pipeline for automated, time-delayed analysis of environmental samples. This approach enables highly accurate quantification and classification of pollen loads (≥ 30 species) while achieving high throughput (≥ 50 samples/day) and can be integrated into existing monitoring networks.

Beyond allergy-related monitoring, this automated analysis framework also opens new avenues for ecological research by enabling large-scale investigations of pollen distribution, biodiversity patterns, and their environmental drivers.

Speaker: Bogusz Bujnowski (iDiv Physiological Diversity)

21 Active Use and Passive Exposure to Urban Green Infrastructure - A Human Health Perspective

Urbanisation has fundamentally transformed the environments in which people live, and with it the constellation of exposures that can shape human health. Urban dwellers are simultaneously subject to the protective influences of surrounding greenspace, bluespace, and tree canopy and the adverse effects of air pollution, noise, and sealed surfaces — yet the large majority of existing studies have examined these exposures in isolation, limiting our understanding of their combined influence on health.
This poster presents findings from a large urban clinical study in which high-resolution spatial data on greenspace, bluespace, canopy cover, tree structural diversity, sealed surfaces, NO₂, PM₁₀, and day- and night-time noise were linked to mental health outcomes across a diverse city population.
A central question is whether it matters not just how much nature surrounds urban residents, but how they engage with it. We contrast passive exposure — residing near parks or tree-lined streets without deliberate contact with active nature experience, such as recreational visits to green or blue spaces.

Speaker: Marie Meemken (Uni Jena)

22 Schoolyard Biodiversity Monitoring with Children: Effects on Human-Nature-Relationships

Nature contact is beneficial for children, positively influencing well-being and nature connectedness. At the same time, citizen science is increasingly used to support biodiversity monitoring across large spatial and temporal scales. Schoolyards represent a promising setting that could combine both, providing everyday nature contact while contributing to biodiversity data collection.
However, this potential rests on three key assumptions that remain largely untested: that schoolyards can support biodiversity, that this data can be collected by children and that such activities provide sufficient nature contact to influence psychological outcomes.
To test these assumptions, we implemented a seven-week citizen science intervention focusing on butterfly and plant monitoring in schoolyards across 15 primary schools in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. The participating schoolyards represented a gradient of biodiversity and naturalness. Children conducted repeated standardized observations of butterflies and plants as part of weekly activities.
Using surveys, we assessed changes in children’s perceived biodiversity, well-being, empowerment and nature connectedness before and after the intervention, and tested whether environmental context moderates these effects. Specifically, we examined whether children at greener schoolyards benefit more strongly from the intervention than those at more sealed, biodiversity-poor sites.
Preliminary results of the first of three field seasons suggest that integrating citizen science into everyday school environments holds promise for both data collection and educational outcomes.

Speaker: Lina von Wedel (UFZ/iDiv)

23 Microbial Community Database (MiCoDa), a Curated Repository for Global Microbiome Data Reuse

The rapid growth of metabarcoding data for studying bacteria worldwide requires extensive curation and bioinformatics expertise, while the computational demands of processing large sequencing datasets often limit data reuse by researchers without specialized infrastructure or training. Here, we present the Microbial Community Database (MiCoDa), a curated repository of published and pre-processed 16S rRNA gene amplicon datasets ready for reuse by experts and non-experts alike. MiCoDa includes tractable species and facilitates microbiome synthesis through a standardized and scalable approach. Datasets are harmonized using the same region of the 16S rRNA gene to improve comparability across studies, while metadata quality is enhanced through human and machine-assisted curation, yielding reliable and interoperable annotations. MiCoDa V2 contains 31,361 samples and 800,678 Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) spanning global environments. Of all samples, 55% belong to the host-associated microbiome (Organisms realm; 17,303 samples), 20% to Water (6,315), 19% to Mineral (5,992), and 5.5% to other environments (1,751), covering all continents and oceans. MiCoDa applies consistent taxonomic definitions across environmental realms. Of the 800,678 ASVs, 15.8% are specific to water ecosystems, 34.2% are organism-associated, and 32.1% are specific to mineral environments, while 4.5% are shared across all three realms. Gammaproteobacteria, Bacteroidia, Alphaproteobacteria, Cyanobacteriia, and Verrucomicrobiae are consistently dominant across all realms. Parcubacteria are enriched in water, Anaerolineae and Dehalococcoidia in mineral ecosystems, and Bacilli and Clostridia in organism associated environments. Relationships between abundance and occupancy (AOR) among prevalent taxa highlight microbial taxa with broad environmental distributions. Overall, MiCoDa bridges key gaps in microbial data integration and reuse, enabling large-scale synthetic, biogeographical, macroecological, and distributional analyses while lowering computational barriers for microbial ecology researchers.

Speaker: Dr Clara Arboleda-Baena (Department of Applied Microbial Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ, Leipzig, 04318, Germany)

24 Uncovering genetic adaptations to arid habitats in three model plants (Loasaceae) from the Atacama and Namib Desert using comparative genomics and environmental data

The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the oldest and driest deserts on earth and harbors over 500 endemic plant species. Among those are the two rather ancient Loasaceae lineages Prosa fruticosa and Huidobria chilensis, which appear to differ in their water requirements. While populations of P. fruticosa are found north of the 10 mm/year isohyet, receiving less than 10 mm rainfall per year, populations of H. chilensis mainly grow to the south of the 10 mm/year isohyet in regions with a somewhat higher annual precipitation. Their contrasting habitat preferences make them ideal study systems to identify genes and gene families involved in drought adaptation through comparative genomic and transcriptomic analyses. We further included the Namib Desert endemic Kissenia capensis (Loasaceae) that shows a similar growth habit, but requires more precipitation than its relatives from Chile. The Atacama and the Namib share a similar history and both are located on the west-coast of a continent with cold ocean currents, which makes K. capensis a comparative reference to help identify genes and gene families related to extreme aridity in the Chilean species and to distinguish lineage effects from true adaptation.
We assembled and annotated high-quality genomes of P. fruticosa, H. chilensis, and K. capensis using PacBio long-read sequences and analyzed the evolution of gene families related to osmotic stress. Additionally, we are interested in genes controlling nutrient element uptake. Nutrients such as potassium and silicon enhance drought tolerance in plants and our preliminary results from strontium isotope analysis (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr) indicate distinct nutrient uptake strategies in P. fruticosa and H. chilensis.
Studying plants’ adaptation strategies to aridity is increasingly important as many regions of our planet are experiencing extended periods of drought due to climate change. Our results will provide valuable insights to help us face future challenges.

Speaker: Julia Simonis (Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP))

25 Don’t call it (just) Citizen Science Data!

Citizen Science data are widely used in ecological research. Yet, the term “Citizen Science data” is often applied as a broad label that overlooks the vast diversity of how such data are collected.
Citizen Science datasets vary widely in quality, ranging from opportunistic point observations to structured recording schemes and well-curated datasets. Broad generalizations risk undervaluing the substantial effort and expertise invested by many contributors. High‐quality datasets, typically requiring rigorous protocols and time‐intensive repeated sampling can be collected by both citizen and professional scientists, but may become less visible when Citizen Science is primarily framed through opportunistic observations.
On our poster we present an overview of papers published in the last decade that state to use Citizen Science data in their research. We show that the use of Citizen Science datasets is generally increasing, but to a much larger extent in favor of datasets using unstructured data. In analysing narratives about Citizen Science data in the assessed papers, we show that the framing of the term is inadequate and overgeneralizing in many instances.
We argue that Citizen Science data should refer only to the origin of the data. That means, that citizen science data are collected by volunteers. Differentiation is needed regarding quality, scope, and bias that must be linked explicitly to the specific data type and sampling design. Greater precision in terminology is essential to reflect the heterogeneity of Citizen Science datasets and to appropriately acknowledge the contributions of expert volunteers.

Speaker: Michael Rzanny (Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena)

26 Sniffing out danger: African Elephants Response to Lion-Derived Olfactory Cues

With agricultural land use continuing to increase, habitat fragmentation worsens, intensifying human-wildlife conflicts across sub-Saharan Africa. Among the most persistent challenges are those involving African elephants (Loxodonta africana), whose activities through anthropogenic areas often result in crop damage, economical loss, and occasionally human and elephant fatalities. A primary driver of these conflicts is crop raiding, as elephants seek high valuable food sources such as maize and cassava. With elephants increasingly moving further into human-inhabited areas and agricultural areas continuing to expand into elephant habitats, these conflicts are expected to intensify, posing challenges for both conservation efforts and local livelihoods. Throughout the decades, a range of mitigation efforts have been implemented to confront these conflicts, including chili-based deterrents and electric fencing. However, most approaches are either costly, logistically difficult to maintain, or show reduced effectiveness over time due to elephant habituation. Recent studies suggest that semi-captive African elephants respond negatively to predator-associated cues, particularly lion feces. This response is likely driven by elephants’ strong olfactory abilities and the presence of lions as natural predators, highlighting the potential of lion feces as a non-invasive and “invisible” mitigation tool. Such cues may induce avoidance behaviour in elephant herds by triggering innate fear responses. This study further examines whether wild African elephants similarly avoid the scent of lion faeces, with the aim of assessing whether compounds mimicking lion scent could be developed as deterrents to reduce human–elephant conflict. Using camera traps, this was tested at a waterhole in Jafuta Reserve (Victoria Falls), where stones and twine soaked in lion faeces were placed across the waterhole. Preliminary results show that weak but consistent trend of avoidance across all herds.Ultimately, this research would help support the development of practical, low-cost mitigation tools that reduce conflict while minimizing impacts on elephant behaviour and space use.

Speaker: Maya Heyland

27 iBarc Support Unit …supports biodiversity research through metabarcoding

Metabarcoding is a powerful approach to study biodiversity across a wide range of organisms and ecosystems. However, integrating molecular data into ecological research remains challenging.
The iBarc Support Unit at iDiv provides guidance, infrastructure, and expertise to researchers interested in integrating metabarcoding approaches into their projects. We offer to accompany you throughout the entire metabarcoding workflow, or or help with specific steps, including project planning, sample preparation, DNA extraction, PCR and library construction, sequencing strategies (e.g. Illumina, Nanopore, PacBio etc.), and downstream bioinformatic analysis across diverse taxonomic groups.
This poster introduces the iBarc Support Unit and shows the workflow how researchers can integrate metabarcoding into their projects with our help. We also highlight example metabarcoding projects from different users of iBarc across the iDiv network, illustrating how metabarcoding is being applied to address diverse ecological and biodiversity research questions.
We welcome researchers at all career stages and with all levels of experience in metabarcoding, from beginners to advanced users. iBarc aims to facilitate exchange, support project development, and help establish metabarcoding as an integral tool in biodiversity and ecological research within the iDiv scientific network.

Speaker: Nadine Möbius (Friedrich Schiller University Jena, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv))

28 Sample size and identification techniques alter soil nematode community assessment

Nematodes are abundant and diverse in soil, influencing microbial community composition, plant performance, and nutrient cycling, and serving as vital bioindicators of soil ecology and health. While metabarcoding techniques have become highly standardized in the identification of microbial (i.e., bacterial and fungal) communities, similar techniques are still under development for soil animals. As metabarcoding techniques become increasingly popular for characterizing soil animals, establishing protocols that are adapted to larger-bodied organisms is necessary. To optimize nematode metabarcoding workflows, we assessed how different identification techniques and soil sample sizes influence estimates of nematode diversity, composition, and resulting nematode community indices. We compared three identification techniques: traditional morphological identification, and two molecular methods using either nematode-extracted DNA or total soil DNA, and tested each across a size gradient (0.25 g – 32 g soil). Sample mass and identification technique shaped community level soil nematode assessments. Increasing soil mass significantly increased taxonomic richness (q = 0) across all methods, while abundance-weighted diversity (q = 1, 2) remained largely unaffected. Morphological identification consistently recovered fewer genera than molecular approaches. Community variability was lowest in soil DNA datasets, and increasing soil mass further reduced variance, particularly for soil DNA and morphological approaches. Methodological differences strongly influenced ecological interpretation. For example, a higher Enrichment Index but a lower Channel Index were observed with the morphological approach than with others, while the Maturity and Structure Indices did not change. Our findings show that methodological choice primarily shapes community structure, while sample size refines detection and improves consistency. Both factors should be considered for reliable and comparable nematode assessments.

Speaker: Lu Wang (UFZ Leipzig)

29 Analysis of the long-term effects of plant species richness on soil microbial multistability

Understanding how plant diversity shapes soil ecosystem functioning over time is a central challenge in biodiversity–ecosystem functioning research. Evidence from long-term experiments suggests that both the magnitude and stability of soil processes increase with biodiversity, as facilitative interactions accumulate in species-rich communities, whereas species-poor systems tend to experience stronger antagonistic feedbacks.
In this study, we examine how plant species richness influences soil microbial biomass and its temporal dynamics. We test four hypotheses: (HI) plant diversity increases the magnitude of soil microbial properties; (HII) the stabilizing effect of diversity strengthens over time; ( III) diversity–stability and diversity–functioning relationships are stronger under long-term than short-term conditions; and (HIV) temporal stability is driven more by resistance than by recovery.
We analyze 24 years of annual microbial biomass data along a plant species richness gradient (1–60 species) from the Jena Experiment, a grassland experiment in central Germany. To capture non-linear temporal dynamics, we apply a non-centered hierarchical model combined with a Gaussian process framework.
Preliminary results indicate that positive effects of plant species richness on microbial biomass increase over time. Ongoing analyses will quantify temporal stability, resistance, and recovery, and explicitly test hypotheses H II–H IV, including contrasts between long-term and experimentally reset communities. By September, we will provide robust estimates of diversity–stability relationships and assess the relative importance of resistance versus recovery dynamics.
Overall, this work advances a mechanistic understanding of how biodiversity regulates both the magnitude and stability of ecosystem functioning across long timescales.

Speaker: Zarah Janda

30 Automated fine-scaled flowering stage classification of allergenic species using citizen science images

Pollen allergies affect around 20% of the population in Central Europe. Anthropogenic changes, such as pollution and warming, are intensifying symptom severity, making pollen allergies a significant public health concern. Many allergy sufferers rely on pollen forecasts to avoid allergen exposure, yet these forecasts often lack sufficient local-scale resolution. Since the flowering phenology of allergenic plants is one of the best predictors of local pollen concentrations, fine-scaled phenological data hold considerable potential for improving local pollen load estimations. Here, we leverage this potential by developing automated recognizers of fine-scaled flowering stages in the key allergenic species of Central Europe using citizen science images. We launched the citizen science project "PollenNet" within the plant identification app Flora Incognita during the pollen season 2024/25, where users are invited to contribute images of flowering key allergenic species, including hazel, alder, birch, grasses, mugwort, and ragweed. To date, citizen scientists have contributed over 61,000 images of hazel, 12,000 of alder, 25,900 of birch, and 10,000 of grass species to the project. We use these images to develop automated classifiers capable of recognizing flowering stages that correspond with the release of pollen. For each species, we train a classifier using feature representations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN). For hazel, the classifier achieved an overall accuracy of >96% in differentiating four detailed flowering stages. The resulting classifiers will provide spatio-temporal phenological data that will ultimately help improve local pollen load estimations and enable near real-time phenological monitoring with Flora Incognita data.

Speaker: Sophie Moreau (Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena)

31 iCyt, the integrative Cytomics support platform of iDiv

Diversity of microscopic biological particles plays a crucial role in important ecosystem services, e.g. water quality (phytoplankton), air quality or pollination (pollen). Many human-driven activities like climate change, eutrophication or invasive species are expected to massively change the composition of these particles. Monitoring of these tiny particles is therefore an essential task in order to detect diversity changes, issue short-term warnings, generally understand and estimate consequences for ecosystems and society, to communicate these observations in a timely way and to support and derive suitable actions. Most monitoring tasks for air and water quality as well as plant-pollinator monitoring are currently performed via microscopic counting which strongly limits sampling capacity and frequency and, as a consequence restricts monitoring to either low spatial and temporal resolutions or non-quantitative assessments of biomass and physiological activity. The iDiv support unit called “iCyt” (“integrative Cytomics”) allows to measure individual cells and particles in suspension independent of their origin (water, soil or air samples of plant, animal or human origin). Our unique cutting-edge high-throughput (imaging) flow cytometry measurement capabilities of individual particles in powerful combination with deep-learning algorithms represent a transformative advance for environmental monitoring. At the same time, the method also enables estimation of particulate biomass, physiological activity or ploidy. We are there to support researchers at iDiv and affiliated institutes with their research questions and needs.

Speaker: Susanne Dunker (UFZ, iDiv (PHYDIV))

32 Sediment type rather than seasonality shapes microbial functional potential in Belgian North Sea sediments: a metagenomic perspective

Marine sediments are hotspots of microbial activity and play a key role in cycling carbon, nitrogen and sulfur at the sea floor. In shallow coastal areas like the Belgian part of the North Sea, sediment characteristics can vary considerably over short distances, from muddy organic rich deposits to coarse permeable sands, creating very different conditions for microbial life. Yet we still know relatively little about how these differences in sediment type, compared to seasonal changes, shape both the taxonomic composition and functional potential of these communities.
In this study, we applied whole metagenomic sequencing to 16 sediment samples collected across four stations with contrasting sediment types in the Belgian North Sea over five seasonal campaigns. This approach allowed us to simultaneously characterize microbial community composition and assess functional gene profiles for nitrogen, carbon and sulfur cycling — going beyond what traditional marker gene approaches can offer.
Beta diversity analysis showed clear separation between stations across all three cycles, with sediment type explaining 58–69% of the variation while sampling month had no significant effect. At the process level, nitrification, denitrification and aerobic respiration were consistently higher at the coarse sandy station while muddy stations showed elevated nitrogen fixation, sulfate reduction and methanogenesis, patterns that matched well with the distinct taxonomic profiles observed at each station. This direct link between community composition and functional potential is something that 16S-based studies simply cannot provide.
These results suggest that sediment type matters a lot more than season for microbial functional diversity in Belgian coastal sediments. Given increasing pressures from bottom trawling and dredging in the Belgian North Sea .i.e. activities known to alter sediment characteristics and benthic communities,this study provides a robust foundation for understanding how physical disturbance may cascade through microbial communities to affect seafloor biogeochemical cycling.

Speaker: Menahil Fatima (iDiv / Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

33 Generative Trait Variability of Cyperaceae Juss. In Context of Phylogeny and Plant Ecology

Homoplasy is widespread in macro- and micromorphological traits of vascular plants, particularly in vegetative characters, which often show limited phylogenetic signal. In contrast, generative traits such as floral characteristics are generally considered more conserved, as demonstrated for embryo architecture and development in Cyperaceae Juss. However, recent work has revealed substantial interspecific variation in generative traits among Poales, notably in the megadiverse genus Carex. Cyperaceae are key components of diverse ecosystems, often forming dominant or monodominant communities in which closely related and distantly related lineages co-occur. This raises fundamental questions about the role of generative trait differentiation in community assembly. We aim to develop a standardized, high-throughput protocol for quantifying pollen traits using imaging flow cytometry. Focusing initially on Carex, we will generate reproducible trait data to assess inter- and intraspecific variation in pollen, generative and other plant functional traits. Especially, magnitude of intraspecific variation may be critical for ecological applications or adaptation to changing environmental conditions, is still poorly understood. The integration of herbarium specimens offers additional potential to broaden spatial and temporal coverage. Overall, this study establishes a methodological framework to link trait variation with phylogenetic and ecological patterns.

Speaker: Dr Sebastian Gebauer (1Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function Jena (SIP) Jena - Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research, Philosophenweg 12, Jena, Germany, 2Institute of Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Philosophenweg 16, Jena, Germany)

34 Herbarium-Based Insights into Long-Term Flowering Phenology and Leaf Nutrients in Mongolian Steppe Species

Herbarium collections provide a unique long-term archive for assessing plant responses to environmental change across broad spatial and temporal scales. We use approximately 4,000 herbarium specimens collected mainly between 1960 and 2025 across the entire territory of Mongolia to investigate long-term shifts in plant phenology in typical steppe ecosystems. The dataset includes 16 focal species representing the major plant families characteristic of Mongolian steppes.
For each specimen, phenological stage was recorded quantitatively, including vegetative stage, buds, flowering, fruiting, and end of fruiting, allowing species-specific estimates of flowering onset, end, and duration over the past six decades. In addition, nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon concentrations were measured non-invasively using near-infrared spectroscopy on the same specimens, enabling direct links between phenological dynamics and leaf nutrient contents.
Using species-specific spatio-temporal models, we analyse shifts in flowering phenology over time and across space and relate these patterns to historical climate variables and leaf nutrient content. By integrating collection date, geographic origin, and climate data, we aim to disentangle temporal trends from spatial gradients and identify region- and species-specific responses.
Based on previous studies, we expect flowering onset to be primarily driven by pre-flowering precipitation, while warming tends to amplify drought stress and precipitation sensitivity rather than act as the primary cue on flowering timing. We further expect nutrient status to be associated with phenological timing and reproductive development, with responses likely differing among species. Overall, this study highlights the potential of herbarium collections for reconstructing long-term ecological change and provides new insights into the climate sensitivity of Mongolian steppe vegetation.

Speaker: Anna Vincze

35 Impact of oil palm plantation use on the gut microbiome of Malaysian macaques

Oil palm cultivation dominates large parts of Southeast Asia and profoundly alters tropical forest ecosystems through habitat fragmentation. Some wildlife species have partly adapted to these human-modified landscapes, including southern pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) which regularly forage in oil palm plantations. Previous research by our group found reduced infant survival associated with increased plantation visitation time, while ongoing studies indicate physiological changes linked to pesticide exposure, with chemical profiles derived from body odour and urine differing significantly before versus after pesticide spraying events. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects remain unclear. Because the gastrointestinal tract is a primary site of dietary influence and toxic exposure, plantation diet and pesticides may directly alter the gut microbiome at structural and functional levels. Such disruptions can affect digestion, immune regulation, and ultimately host fitness, yet microbiome-mediated effects on wildlife remain poorly understood. This project investigates how plantation foraging and pesticide exposure influence gut microbiome structure and function in wild pig-tailed macaques. We specifically hypothesize that microbiome composition is influenced by time spent on plantation and differs before and after pesticide spraying events and we predict gut microbial diversity to be reduced after exposure to pesticides. Additionally, this study will provide the first characterization of gut microbiome variation across sex and age classes in wild Macaca nemestrina populations. We collected 287 faecal samples from 30 individuals of two habituated groups between April 2025 and April 2026 in Segari Melintang Forest Reserve, Peninsular Malaysia, with targeted sampling conducted prior to and following pesticide (Glyphosate/Paraquat) spraying events. Microbiome composition and function will be analysed using 16S rRNA gene sequencing and shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Overall, this work seeks to investigate if the gut microbiome could be an understudied lens into anthropogenic influence and how supposedly beneficial behavioural flexibility in agricultural landscapes masks underlying physiological costs in wildlife.

Speaker: Miriam Simon

36 Microbial predators under pressure: soil protist community shifts under long-term fertilization.

Protists are the most abundant predators in soils. Despite their abundance, they have only recently gained more attention in soil ecological studies. Understanding their biotic interactions and how they shape microbial communities is particularly important given the increasing anthropogenic pressure on ecosystems. Long-term fertilization (LTF), one of the most pervasive human impacts on soils, is known to affect fungal and bacterial communities. However, the impact of LTF on protist communities and predator-prey interactions in soils remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigate the impact of LTF on protist diversity and predator-prey dynamics in agricultural soils. We hypothesize that shifts in bacterial communities drive corresponding changes in protist communities. To test this hypothesis, we analysed 60 plots of the Zurich Organic Fertilization Experiment (ZOFE). Using metabarcoding of the small subunit ribosomal RNA genes, we analysed the bacterial, eukaryotic and, using specific primers, the Cercozoan communities. Cercozoa are often the most abundant predatory protists found in metabarcoding studies of soils. Additionally, we measured abiotic soil parameters and performed qPCR of 16S rRNA genes. Our preliminary analysis indicates that LTF does not affect the richness of the investigated microbial groups, but drives changes in their community composition. We detected a significant increase of the parasitic protist taxon Phytomyxea in the compost treatment. Mantel correlation analysis shows that changes in bacterial communities are positively correlated with changes in Cercozoan communities, even after correcting for abiotic effects. We will functionally classify the eukaryotic sequences using the EukFUNC database, and extend it with data on the morphology and locomotion of protists. This trait-based approach will allow us to link shifts in the protist community to potential changes in protist functions, predator-prey dynamics and nutrient cycling.

Speaker: Nicola Schilling (Applied Microbial Ecology, UfZ Leipzig, yDiv)

37 How to Identify Patches of Hyperspectral Entropy in Forest Soil Profiles from Fläming, Germany

Forest soils exhibit strong depth-related spatial heterogeneities, with localized hotspot zones that regulate key ecosystem processes and contribute to soil resilience. Conventional bulk soil measurements are limited in their ability to capture this fine-scale variability. This study aims to explore the potential of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) to quantify spatial heterogeneity and by this to identify potential hotspot zones in forest soil profiles from the Fläming region, Germany, showing a great heterogeneity of the geological substrate due to different thicknesses of a sand loess cover over coarser-grained Late Saalian moraine material.
Intact soil cores were collected from field sites and analyzed using a HySpex hyperspectral imaging system covering the spectral range of 400–2500 nm. The acquired hyperspectral data were preprocessed and analyzed to extract relevant spectral information. Dimensionality reduction techniques, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF), were applied to identify the most informative spectral features.
To assess spatial heterogeneity, pixel-wise spectral divergence was computed using the Kullback–Leibler pseudo-divergence (KLPD), incorporating both spectral shape and intensity differences. Each pixel spectrum was compared to a global median reference spectrum derived from the entire soil core. Based on this, spatial maps and entropy-based classifications were generated to identify zones of increased spectral variability
Preliminary results revealed a highly skewed distribution of spectral divergence, with most pixels exhibiting low variability and a limited number of pixels showing strong deviations from the global median reference. Spatial analysis indicated that these high-divergence zones occurred as discrete patches, particularly in the upper sections of the soil profile. Classification into low, medium, and high entropy levels highlighted these localized regions of increased spectral complexity.
These findings suggest that HSI is capable of resolving fine-scale soil heterogeneity and identifying candidate hotspot zones. Further integration with independent soil biological and physico-chemical measurements will be used to evaluate the functional relevance of these regions.

Speaker: Dr Riffat Rahim (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig – iDiv , Johannisallee 19a 04103 Leipzig)

38 Wenhui Liu

Vegetation changes affect the Earth-atmosphere energy balance through both surface albedo and cloud-mediated radiative effects. However, inadequate consideration of cloud albedo feedbacks and differences among cloud types may bias estimates of regional radiative impacts. Using satellite and reanalysis data, we show that increased vegetation reduces surface albedo and leads to warming under cloudless conditions. However, considering cloud feedback reveals that cloud albedo can substantially offset this warming. Especially in tropical regions, cloud albedo can fully reverse the surface warming, leading to net cooling with an offset rate of 155%. This contrasts sharply with extratropical regions, where vegetation-induced increases in cloud reflectivity offset only about 42% of the surface warming. This more pronounced tropical offset arises because increased vegetation leads to greater cloud formation and favors cloud types with higher albedo. Vegetation enhances latent heat flux, stabilizes the lower atmosphere, and promotes energy accumulation, thereby favoring the formation of stratiform and deep convective clouds. In contrast, in extratropical regions, stronger sensible heat dominates, primarily triggering shallow convective clouds with relatively weak reflectivity. These results highlight that assuming globally uniform cloud responses cannot accurately capture the climatic effects of vegetation change, particularly the complete offset of surface warming by tropical cloud feedbacks and would substantially underestimate the cooling contribution of vegetation.

Speaker: Wenhui Liu (Leipzig Institute for Meteorology)

39 PhenObs@herbaria: A New Protocol to Synchronize Phenological Observations from Physical Herbarium Records with Field-Based Observations

Long-term phenological data is essential for climate change research, yet consistent, multi-century datasets are scarce. While herbaria provide a unique temporal archive, the recent reliance on digitised specimen images has limitations, as many subtle phenological traits are invisible or distorted in 2D formats. In this poster, we present the conceptual framework for PhenObs@herbaria, a new initiative by the international phenology network of botanical gardens, PhenObs.
The project aims to bridge the gap between spatial phenological patterns observed in botanical gardens and temporal patterns preserved in herbaria. We propose a novel protocol specifically designed for examining physical specimens, ensuring that the level of accuracy of observations is comparable to that of field observations. We outline a pilot study involving 34 herbaceous species to test the alignment of phenological variation across regional and European scales. By focusing on the physical specimens as 3D biological records, PhenObs@herbaria provides a standardised methodology for integrating historical collections into modern phenological monitoring.

Speaker: Josephine Ulrich (Friedrich Schiller University, Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP) Jena)

40 Mycorrhiza in Tree Diversity-Ecosystem Function Relationships: the first ten years of the iDiv experimental platform MyDiv

The widely observed positive relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning is thought to be driven by complementary resource use of plant species. Biotic interactions among plants and between plants and soil organisms are suggested to drive key aspects of resource-use complementarity. The young tree diversity experiment MyDiv aims to integrate biotic interactions across guilds of organisms, more specifically between plants and mycorrhizal fungi, to explain resource-use complementarity in plants and its consequences for competition and multitrophic interactions. Our overarching hypothesis is that ecosystem functioning increases when more plant species associate with functionally dissimilar mycorrhizal fungi (arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi). Here, we present an extract of results from the past ten years of MyDiv. We investigated tree mycorrhization with classical and novel techniques as well as different ecosystems functions ranging from tree productivity to herbivory and energy fluxes through food webs as affected by tree species richness and mycorrhizal type. The studies largely showed that tree species richness and identity effects dominate over mycorrhizal type effects in the early stage of the experiment. Furthermore, tree communities with two mycorrhizal types experienced rather additive effects that were in between that of arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal communities. We showed that plant communities differ in their preferred fungal communities. Overall, the results of the first ten years of the experimental platform reveal strengthening distinct mechanisms of the two mycorrhizal types with time driving life strategies of trees and biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships.

Speaker: Dr Olga Ferlian (iDiv)

41 Global patterns of marcescence: Retention of withered organs in perennial herbs

Marcescence, the retention of withered plant organs over winter that would otherwise be shed, remains poorly studied in perennial herbs, despite its potential role in plant phenology and adaptation to climate change, including increasingly extreme conditions at the onset and end of the growing season. Marcescent biomass can protect developing tissues from water, light, or temperature stress, as well as herbivory. Yet, most research on marcescence has focused on trees, leaving marcescence occurrence and function in perennial herbaceous species largely unexplored. Unlike trees, where marcescence typically involves only leaves, perennial herbs may retain leaves, stems, and inflorescences, suggesting that the phenomenon may manifest differently across growth forms and vary in its functional significance.

To fill this gap, our project investigated inter- and intra-specific variation in marcescence among perennial herbaceous species in the northern temperate zone. To achieve this, we conducted surveys at 11 botanical gardens spanning Europe, North America, and Asia. We evaluated 152 plant species for the presence or absence of marcescence. To assess species’ marcescence intensity, for a subset of 108 species, we compared dead biomass in January with peak biomass from the previous growing season.
Using these data, we analyzed inter- and intraspecific patterns of marcescence across the study region and examined how they relate to phylogenetic relationships and key plant functional traits, such as height, specific leaf area, growth strategy, and bud bank position. This is the first study to assess marcescence in herbaceous plants across geographically and climatically contrasting sites, revealing how environmental context shapes variation in biomass retention across the northern temperate zone.

Speaker: Tereza Maskova

42 Potential of multiselective GCMS for eco-metabolomics on bumblebees

Bees, especially bumblebees, are crucial to ecosystems and humanity as pollinators, supporting biodiversity and crop production. However, their populations are declining related to global warming, pesticides, invasive species, pathogens, and agricultural intensification. Effective conservation requires a deep understanding of bee-environment interactions and efficient health monitoring. Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, still underexplored for bumblebees, is a powerful tool for assessing their physiological state.
We applied a GCMS-based multiselective workflow to Bombus terrestris (large earth bumblebee) to establish an approach for future stress assessment in ecological metabolomics. Five B. terrestris specimens, reared at MLU Halle, were dissected into tissues, extracted with an aqueous-methanolic mixture, and analysed via GC-EI-MS. Semi-automated peak picking (AMDIS) and spectral database matching (NIST, HMDB, Golm) yielded a metabolite inventory of 340 compounds, with 214 tentatively identified. Compounds were collected in a custom mass spectral library for future use as a first major outcome of our work. Identified metabolites include mono- and di-sugars, sugar alcohols and acids, amino acids, organic carboxylates, nucleobases and others, covering central primary metabolism (e.g., citrate cycle), suitable for stress detection (e.g., malnutrition). Amino acid pathways were also accessible, enabling monitoring of regulation between lipid, protein, and sugar metabolism. Metabolite profiles strongly differed between body parts: e.g. amino acids were elevated in the gut region (reflecting microbiome metabolism), while energy metabolism compounds dominated in head and thorax. In addition to compound detection and identification, we also explored the use of dissection liquid and detailed organ dissection leading to unfavourable risks of metabolite leakage and cross-contamination between body compartments requiring improvements in future protocols.
Overall, our approach provides a promising foundation for ecological bumblebee studies, enabling simultaneous quantitative assessment of metabolites indicative of stress or biotic interactions. Differential responses across body parts may guide future dissection strategies for targeted sensitive biomarker assessment.

Speaker: Ferdinand Krause (Universität Leipzig)

43 Recovery of Bryophyte Species Diversity after Revitalization Measures in the Klosterlaunitzer Mire through Floristic Mapping and Environmental Data

The Klosterlausnitz mire is the largest peatland in eastern Thuringia. The project area is part of the ‘Sümpfe und Wälder bei Bad Klosterlausnitz’ nature reserve and is located within the Flora-Fauna-Habitat (FFH) conservation area of the same name. Peat extraction, eutrophication, and the construction of the A9 motorway through the site have severely disrupted the water and nutrient balance of this mesotrophic, acidic through-flow mire between 1920 and 1972. Revitalization measures by a Natura2000 project in 2023 aimed to raise the groundwater level by installing 24 sheet pile walls. Bryophytes are an important component of peatlands and serve as indicator organisms for environmental change and thus can aid in the assessment of the revitalizations measures in the Klosterlausnitz mire.
Our study aims to determine the influence of various factors, such as nutrient content, water levels, light conditions, and proximity to woodlands, on the bryophyte species composition and coverage. Five subplots were established at each of the 11 permanent monitoring sites to determine the diversity and exact coverage of the bryophytes. Loggers were deployed to collect environmental data and measure light conditions, humidity, and temperature at each site. Furthermore, water levels at various points in the bog were accessed and compared with data from previous years.
Research focusing on bryophytes, particularly sphagnum moss, in peatlands is becoming increasingly important considering global change. Peatlands, and here mainly bryophytes, store large amounts of carbon dioxide, and restoring them is becoming ever more crucial. Our findings will provide valuable insights into how various factors affect revitalization processes in peatlands. They may also help identify future positive changes, such as growing peat moss layers, increased carbon storage, and increased bryophyte populations, as well as negative changes, such as the loss of bryophyte species.

Speaker: Greta Störkmann (Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution, Friedrich-Schiller University (FSU), Philosophenweg 12, 07743 Jena, Germany; Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function Jena (SIP), Philosophenweg 12, 07743 Jena, Germany)

44 Investigating the impact of aboveground invertebrate decline on belowground energy fluxes

Ecosystem processes and multifunctionality are impacted by global change through the alteration of above-belowground multitrophic communities in terrestrial ecosystems. Global change manifests in many ways, one of them being the decline of aboveground invertebrate communities. Sharp invertebrate declines have been reported for German grasslands in particular, with heretofore little information about the consequences for trophic interactions and ecosystem functioning. With our study, we aim to investigate how aboveground invertebrate declines are impacting various soil ecosystem processes. We established an Ecotron experiment, titled Insect Armageddon, in which we experimentally reduced aboveground invertebrate biomass in three levels: 0% reduced, 64% reduced, and 100% reduced. A comprehensive set of approaches allowed us to assess belowground decomposition and energy fluxes via the construction of soil food webs for estimating key ecosystem processes such as belowground herbivory and pest-control. We expect intact aboveground invertebrate communities to support higher ecosystem functioning, and decreased functioning for communities with simulated aboveground invertebrate decline. Our first results show that reduced aboveground invertebrate biomass significantly increases belowground herbivore pressure. This finding suggests that declines in aboveground invertebrate communities can alter belowground trophic interactions and associated ecosystem processes with potential consequences for soil health.

Speaker: Ioannis Constantinou (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig / University of Leipzig)

Afternoon Sessions: Approaches

Conveners: Marius Munschek (iDiv), Stefan Knauß

45 LEPMON: Monitoring nocturnal insects using cameras and AI: first results of a collaborative project

Two parallel trends have spurred the development of automated insect monitoring technology: increasing awareness of insect population declines and growing capabilities of artificial intelligence. LEPMON is a collaborative project of five German institutes aiming to design and test an AI-driven system for species-level monitoring of moths and other nocturnal insects. The project encompasses hardware development, data management, AI identification, citizen science for trap operation and image annotation, and ecological field testing. LEPMON started operation in 2025, and here I will present its first results. We have deployed our Automatic Recorders of Nocturnal Insects at 47 locations, along 5 urbanization gradients and recorded well over 1 million images, corresponding to 1.1 million bounding boxes. We are currently in the process of annotating the images to train the AI.
Effective monitoring requires recording and communicating reliable numbers of individuals per species. To investigate if automatic recorders derive such reliable numbers, we tested how often individual moths are recorded on the screen, and thus how high the chances of double counts are. We did this by a mark-recapture study of 31 individual moths in 2025, and found that almost all moths visited the screen multiple times per night, and that a non-negligible number of moths (5 out of 31) were seen on more than one night. When counting the number of individuals of each species, the likelihood of double counts is thus very high, and we are currently developing statistical procedures to correct these multiple counts post-hoc.

Speaker: Roel van Klink (MLU)

46 Automated Transcription of Herbarium Labels

Digitized herbarium collections represent a crucial repository of botanical data, offering invaluable historical records for biodiversity research. However, manually transcribing textual information from specimen labels remains a labor-intensive and time-consuming bottleneck for global herbaria, largely due to the high variation and unique styles of handwritten scripts. To address this challenge, we present an end-to-end automated system designed to significantly accelerate information extraction from digitized herbarium labels. This functional pipeline optimizes processing efficiency by sequentially integrating object detection with multimodal transcription and structured parsing.

In the first stage, the system performs automated object detection to localize text labels and relevant metadata regions within high-resolution images, effectively isolating meaningful non-biological components—such as labels, stamps, and barcodes—from the physical plant specimen. Subsequently, the localized image regions are processed using multimodal large language models (LLMs). Leveraging their powerful contextual understanding and generalization capabilities, LLMs perform simultaneous text recognition and semantic parsing of key botanical attributes, including species name, collector, date, and geographic location. While commercial LLM APIs currently yield the highest accuracy, they raise concerns regarding data privacy and long-term recurring costs. To address these limitations, we develop approaches to utilize locally deployed open-weight models as a viable alternative.

Our evaluations show that the pipeline effectively handles variations in label placement and categories, while reliably transcribing text from both printed and handwritten labels. By integrating object detection with LLMs, this workflow significantly mitigates the human effort and temporal costs associated with specimen digitization, ultimately accelerating the public accessibility of structured biodiversity data.

Speaker: chenhuan wu

47 Scaling flower trait phenotyping: Deep learning and large crowdsourced imagery reveal spatiotemporal flower coloration gradients in Alpine gentians

Quantifying intraspecific trait variation on a large scale is essential to understanding how biodiversity responds to environmental changes. However, high-resolution phenotypic data has historically been scarce in complex, mountainous landscapes. This study presents a scalable, automated pipeline that extracts flower color traits (FCTs), such as CIELAB coordinates and hue, from unstructured biodiversity observations. The study focuses on the vibrant blue flowers of Gentiana acaulis and G. verna in the European Alps. Specifically, we investigated whether these species differ in their mean FCTs and examined whether the resulting intraspecific variation is distributed nonrandomly across space and time. We used a dataset of 23,000 flowers from 6,000 locations gathered over five years. Using a deep learning segmentation framework, we isolated the flowers in the raw images to extract the FCTs in the CIELAB color space. We modeled these traits against spatiotemporal and abiotic predictors using multivariate regressions. Our results demonstrate distinct color identities: G. acaulis exhibited a hue distribution that was significantly shifted toward violet-purple, and G. verna was characterized by a more intense blue. Both species exhibited significant geographical structuring and temperature-driven gradients. However, G. verna displayed additional color shifts associated with elevation and interannual variation. Furthermore, G. verna showed a correlation between color change and the day of the year, which indicates the color fading phenological effect as the season progresses. Our study shows how combining computer vision with macroecological modeling can transform crowdsourced data into robust evidence for trait-based research.

Speaker: Ladislav Hodac (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry)

Afternoon Sessions: Open Session

Conveners: Aleksandra Pienkowska (German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Leipzig, Germany; Department of Physiological Diversity, Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany), Brigitte Braschler (iDiv and Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg)

48 Cloud, vegetation, and climate: interactions and implications

Cloud, vegetation, and climate are tightly coupled. On the one hand, clouds regulate surface radiation and water availability, thereby influencing photosynthesis; on the other hand, vegetation modifies land-atmosphere fluxes and feeds back on cloud formation and radiative forcing. Here, we synthesize recent advances from these two complementary perspectives.
The first part examines the impacts of clouds on vegetation photosynthesis. Using observational- and model-based datasets spanning recent decades, we show that the sensitivity of photosynthesis to cloud cover is spatially modulated by hydroclimatic conditions. In water-limited regions, clouds enhance photosynthesis by increasing precipitation. Conversely, in energy-limited regions, clouds reduce photosynthesis by diminishing incoming solar radiation. Under global warming, projected changes in cloud cover are expected to reduce photosynthesis in arid regions while enhancing it in humid regions, thereby amplifying regional disparities in ecosystem functioning.
The second part focuses on the impacts of deforestation on clouds and climate. By combining climate model simulations with data-driven approaches, we find that deforestation locally reduces low-level clouds. These cloud reductions primarily result from weakened surface turbulent heat fluxes, which constrain atmospheric uplift and moisture supply. The resulting radiative warming from reduced cloud albedo partially offsets the cooling effect associated with increased surface albedo following deforestation.

Speaker: Hao Luo (Leipzig University)

49 Comparative landscape genomics of connectivity in three co-occurring bumble bee species

Anthropogenic landscape change increasingly alters the movement of organisms and the exchange of genes across landscapes, yet predicting its effects on functional connectivity remains a major challenge in ecology and evolution. Gene flow across heterogeneous environments can be shaped by multiple, non-mutually exclusive processes, including isolation by distance (IBD), isolation by resistance (IBR) and isolation by environment (IBE). The relative importance of these processes is expected to vary among species because ecological traits influence how organisms perceive and move through landscapes. However, most landscape genomic studies focus on single species, limiting broader inference about the generality of connectivity patterns across taxa.
Here, we investigated genomic connectivity in three widespread and co-occurring bumble bee species—Bombus terrestris, B. pascuorum and B. lapidarius—across an intensively managed agricultural landscape in southern Germany. Using a spatially explicit grid-based sampling design, we collected one individual per species within 1.5 × 1.5 km landscape cells (B. terrestris n = 127, B. pascuorum n = 145 and B. lapidarius n = 101) to minimise non-independence arising from colony structure and spatial clustering. We generated whole-genome-derived SNP data to examine the relative roles of geographic distance, landscape resistance, and environmental heterogeneity in shaping genomic differentiation.
Specifically, we tested for patterns of IBD, estimated resistance effects of different land-use types using IBR approaches, and assessed whether environmental differences, particularly temperature and land-cover dissimilarity, contribute to genomic differentiation independently of geographic distance (IBE). By integrating comparative population genomics with a standardized sampling design, this study evaluates whether connectivity patterns are shared across closely related pollinator species or mediated by species-specific ecological traits. More broadly, our work contributes to understanding how multiple processes interact to shape genomic connectivity in human-modified landscapes.

Speaker: Christopher Wild (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Naturkundemuseum Erfurt)

50 Small bodied mammals show more constraint in their jaw ecomorphologies than large bodied mammals

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, including their feeding ecology and therefore jaw morphology. Here we test whether increases in jaw phenotypic disparity among early Cenozoic mammals is linked to their evolutionary expansion into larger body sizes that may have permitted the exploration of new feeding roles. Using jaw continuous character traits for Jurassic-Eocene and for Recent (including Pleistocene megafauna) mammals, we analysed jaw ecomorphological disparity across small and large bodied mammals using a principal component analysis. Additionally, using a recently published metatree of synapsids pruned to include the mammaliaform and mammal species from this study, we analysed rates of jaw morphological diversification and compared these rates to body mass evolution. We found that large mammals have higher jaw ecomorphological disparity than small mammal throughout the early Cenozoic and in the Recent. Moreover, extant and Pleistocene large mammals show higher disparity than Eocene large mammals, and there are some jaw morphologies that are unique to large mammals relative to small mammals.

Speaker: Gemma Benevento (iDiv)

51 COLLECTION BASED STUDIES ON THE BRYOPHYTE FLORA FROM CUBA

The aim of the present study is to contribute to the understanding of the diversity of the Cuban bryophyte flora within a historical and geographical context, based on a revision of herbarium specimens primarily held at the herbaria Haussknecht (JE) in Jena, Germany and EGR from the Department of Botany and Ecology in Eszterházy University in Eger, Hungary, as well as duplicates and original specimens from the former herbarium of the Instituto de Botánica, Academia de Ciencias de Cuba (HAC), currently belonging to the herbarium BSC of the Centro Oriental de Ecosistemas y Biodiversidad (BIOECO) in Santiago de Cuba. The specimens were collected mainly during the late 20th century in Western, Central, and Eastern Cuba by both Cuban and foreign botanists. The study of the specimens involved their taxonomic identification using conventional sample preparation techniques for microscopic observation, consultation of specialized literature, and, in some cases, comparison with type specimens or specimens previously identified by specialists. To date, approximately 1.120 herbarium samples have been revised, the majority of which contain more than one specimen belonging to a different species. 50 taxa represent new findings for this Caribbean nation. Of these, 10 are new records of mosses, 32 are new records of liverworts, and 8 are new species of leafy liverworts belonging to the family Lejeuneaceae. Some of these new findings have already been published, while the rest will be published shortly. These results, derived from the revision of these herbarium collections, highlight the high bryological diversity in Cuba.

Speaker: Bernardo Daniel Cañiza Ovelar (Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function at Friedrich Schiller University Jena Herbarium Haussknecht (JE))

52 What counts as worth saving? Conservation units and priorities from biodiversity to behavioral diversity

Although biodiversity is widely acknowledged as worth conserving, conservation science has long grappled with what, exactly, that diversity comprises and which components should be prioritized. Diversity, by definition, is an aggregate of multiple smaller entities or units, yet those units can be defined in many ways. Are species or populations the relevant building blocks of biodiversity? Should we focus on genetic or functional diversity, or instead on particular sites or ecological processes?

Recently, animal behavioral and cultural variation has begun to be recognized as a further dimension of biodiversity. As a contributor to population persistence and adaptive capacity under environmental change, behavioral and cultural diversity is increasingly viewed as a valuable target for sustainable conservation. However, simply adding “behavior” to existing lists of diversity components does not resolve underlying conservation dilemmas. The question of which elements of behavioral variation should count as conservation targets ultimately shapes how behavioral diversity is delineated, monitored, and judged relevant to conservation success.

In this talk, I draw on emerging work on animal cultural diversity to systematically compare how different ways of defining units and setting priorities affect what is counted, valued, and ultimately conserved across behavioral and more familiar dimensions of biodiversity. I examine how familiar prioritization criteria (e.g., rarity, distinctiveness, contribution to resilience and adaptive potential, feasibility of intervention, risk of loss, and ethical and social values) translate to behavioral diversity, and where this translation exposes tensions between trait‑, diversity‑, and process‑focused strategies, including triage‑like dilemmas when distinctive cultural units face uncertain futures. Ultimately, I argue that making these choices about units and criteria explicit not only enables conservation planning to better integrate animal culture, but also clarifies how analogous decisions shape biodiversity conservation outcomes more generally.

Speaker: Erin Wessling (iDiv)

53 You ask iAnswer: Mobilizing iDiv Data for the Public with a Question-Answering Interface for the PhenObs Knowledge Graph

iDiv has amassed heaps of knowledge – hidden in publications, theses, and databases. In the iAnswer project we want to explore whether a combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can unveil this knowledge and make it accessible to scientists and the general public. In the first year of iAnswer, we collaborated with the team of the iDiv strategic project PhenObs to build a semantically enriched KG for PhenObs data that represents phenological observations and integrates species and botanical garden information with LCVP, GBIF, and Wikidata to further support data synthesis efforts. As KG querying is notoriously difficult for non-expert users, we developed a user interface application that allows queries via natural language with the help of LLM techniques. With this application, we support users of different levels of ecological expertise to interact with research data by translating query results into language appropriate for different user groups. In this talk, we present our efforts and lessons learned to the iDiv community and give an outlook on our plans for the next two years of iAnswer.

Speaker: Tarek Al Mustafa (iDiv)

Afternoon Sessions: Transdisciplinary

Conveners: Edit Hunyadi, Gavin Stark (iDiv/MLU)

54 BES-SIM 2: Projecting global biodiversity and ecosystem services under positive futures for people and nature

BES-SIM 2 is a global, multidisciplinary model intercomparison exercise developing future projections of biodiversity and ecosystem service change. Building on its first iteration, BES-SIM 2 draws on the Nature Futures Framework (NFF)— a set of plausible, positive futures for people and nature — to explore the combined effects of human and climate pressures across terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems. It brings together 15 terrestrial and 10 marine modelling teams working at regional and global scales.

The exercise addresses the following research frontiers: (i) advancing model intercomparison as a means to assess future trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services and to test and quantify uncertainties across models; (ii) incorporating multi-scale modelling to link global trends with regional and local dynamics; (iii) integrating social-ecological feedbacks to capture the dynamic interactions between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human systems; and (iv) bringing terrestrial and marine domains together within a comparable modelling framework. Outputs are delivered as Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) in standardised, FAIR-compliant EBV data cubes, enabling transparent cross-model synthesis and reuse.

In this talk, we introduce the BES-SIM 2 framework and present preliminary results from the ongoing modelling effort. Through these advances, BES-SIM 2 will contribute to the upcoming IPBES Second Global Assessment and support international biodiversity strategies, most notably the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), providing a scientific basis for conservation and sustainability decision-making.

Speaker: Andrés Mármol-Guijarro (Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittemberg)

55 Future Land Use Scenarios Present Opportunities and Risks for the Conservation of Continental Ecological Connectivity

Fragmentation of viable habitat patches by human land use change is a global threat to the maintenance of biodiversity and resilient ecosystems. This threat is compounded by climate change which will require many animal and plant species to shift their natural geographic ranges to stay within a sustainable habitat-climate envelope. Currently, there is general concern that the configuration of the world’s protected areas is inadequate for maintaining the required connections needed for species to shift their range. It is therefore highly important to evaluate how human land use and climate change could influence ecological connectivity moving into the future in order to plan for an expanded protected area network. Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) climate change scenarios and Nature Futures Framework (NFF) land use scenarios provide a means of projecting changes in landscape land use under diverging social and ecological conditions. Subsequently, this allows estimating how ecological connectivity could spatially change under those diverging future conditions. We used graph and omnidirectional circuit-theory models to evaluate how ecological connectivity could change under four different future land use scenarios compared to current conditions. Overall, mean cost distance for corridors across the connectivity networks were higher under all future conditions when compared with current conditions. This indicates that no matter the future scenario, biodiversity attempting to traverse future corridors will face higher landscape resistances likely increasing levels of stress and mortality threat. Omnidirectional models showed more area under high priority status with Nature for Society and Nature as Culture scenarios due to relatively higher intensity human land use compressing movement into narrower landscape channels. However, the overall prioritized rankings of corridors did not substantially change across scenarios. These results can be directly incorporated into spatial planning at the regional, national and multi-national scales in order to better capture future threats to connectivity and biodiversity.

Speaker: Jeremy Dertien (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany)

56 The Conservation Status and Trend Index (CSTI): A Unified Metric for Assessing EU Biodiversity

State of Nature reporting under Article 17 of the Habitats Directive generates comprehensive datasets on European biodiversity, yet presenting conservation status and trends separately often obscures genuine ecological shifts behind administrative or methodological updates. To address this complexity, the Conservation Status and Trend Index (CSTI) was developed to integrate current status and trend trajectory into a unified, transparent score ranging from 0 (Bad-Deteriorating) to 1 (Good-Improving). This framework utilizes a 9-point linear scale, weighting conservation status three times more than trend to prioritize foundational ecological conditions while employing a backcasting methodology to filter out non-ecological data shifts. Analysis of the 2024 reporting dataset indicates a widespread decline in ecological stability, with the majority of the analyzed feature groups decreasing in mean CSTI scores since 2018. Species generally maintain a more favorable condition compared to habitats, though both categories trended downward between 2018 and 2024, with habitats declining more steeply. European habitats remain in a critical state, as around a fifth of all assessments are classified as Bad-Deteriorating. Rocky habitats and mammals represent the most favorable groups, while dune habitats exhibit the lowest mean index. The largest taxonomic declines occurred within amphibians and molluscs. By translating multi-dimensional biodiversity data into a scalable, intuitive index, the CSTI provides an objective tool for resource allocation, offering a standard framework to prioritize conservation actions, track regional progress, and evaluate intervention efficacy under the upcoming EU Nature Restoration Regulation.

Speaker: Jose Valdez (idiv)

57 Towards Integrative Biodiversity Research through eLTER RI: Linking Long-Term Ecosystem Observation, Data Infrastructures, and Actionable Knowledge

Climate change, pollution, and unsustainable resource use interact across ecological and socio-ecological systems, yet biodiversity research and monitoring are often fragmented across disciplines, spatial scales, and data infrastructures. The emerging Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI) addresses this challenge through a whole-system approach that integrates long-term ecosystem observations driven by scientific questions, experimental research, socio-ecological perspectives, and harmonised environmental data across Europe.
eLTER RI currently operates research sites and platforms in over 20 European countries in the long term, covering major environmental and socio-economic gradients. Its design integrates observations across the geosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and anthroposphere, through a set of Standard Observations enabling contextualised analyses of interacting global change drivers. Moreover, eLTER RI provides central services for data integration, synthesis, modelling, and access through interoperable infrastructures and FAIR-oriented workflows.
This contribution presents the eLTER RI as an asset for integrative biodiversity research and discusses how the research infrastructure can support synthesis across disciplines, data domains, and policy contexts. Three key dimensions relevant to integrative biodiversity science are: (1) the advancement of a whole-system approach linking biodiversity dynamics with the surrounding spheres and social-ecological structures; (2) the development of interoperable standards, harmonised observation protocols, and scalable data infrastructures that facilitate FAIR data management; and (3) the generation of continental-scale synthesis products and actionable knowledge for environmental policy and restoration planning.
By combining long-term ecological observations with emerging analytical approaches and coordinated European infrastructures, eLTER RI provides a blueprint for advancing integrative biodiversity research. The infrastructure demonstrates how harmonised observation, multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, and synthesis-oriented data services can strengthen the scientific basis for understanding and managing biodiversity change across Europe.

Speaker: Jori Maylin Marx (UFZ)

58 Assessing open biodiversity data to meet growing policy demands in the EU

To protect biodiversity and mitigate its loss, a growing suite of policies have been implemented from global to local scales over recent decades. Within the European Union, multiple legislative frameworks aim to protect key species and habitats, control invasive alien species (IAS), reduce biodiversity loss, and conserve pollinator communities. A central requirement across these policies is the assessment of species status and trends by Member States (MS). Here, we analyse data associated with five species lists covered by the Nature Directives, the IAS Regulation, EU Red Lists, and the Pollinators Initiative (PI), focusing on species overlap, taxonomic coverage, and spatial and temporal distribution. Across the assessed lists, 16 MS are required to report on more than 500 species, with Spain having the highest reporting obligation (1,107 species). Using billions of records of open data published through GBIF, and reducing its dimension with the occurrence cube approach (i.e., SQL grouping), we observed an exponential increase over time in data availability for some, but not all, policy frameworks. The Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) shows the highest number of species occurrences, followed by the Birds Directive. However, disparities in data availability persist, with already data-poor species falling further behind. In terms of temporal patterns, we identified a unimodal distribution of records for the Habitats Directive (HD), IAS, and PI, and a bimodal distribution for the Birds Directive (BD), MSFD, and EU Red List. Overall, the increasing demand for biodiversity assessments—both spatially and temporally—alongside the expanding number of policy obligations, highlights the need for strategic national planning and targeted support to MS. This should take into account the growing volume of species demands and data required for effective policy reporting.

Speaker: Lina Estupinan Suarez

59 From ecosystem service dependencies to spatial biodiversity impact hotspots in food supply chains

Assessing dependencies on ecosystem services and impacts on biodiversity along food supply chains is difficult because company data on raw materials differ in specificity, traceability, and spatial resolution. This is particularly relevant for globally traded agricultural commodities, for which companies may know quantities and countries of origin, but not exact production locations within countries. In the Business for Biodiversity (B4B) project, we develop a spatially explicit workflow linking ecosystem service dependency assessment with subnational modelling of biodiversity impacts.
Potential ecosystem service dependencies are identified by linking raw materials and value-chain activities to literature-based and ENCORE-informed dependency categories and, where available, refining these assessments with company input. To assess biodiversity impacts, sourcing volumes are allocated from reported countries of origin to subnational administrative units using national production statistics and crop-specific gridded production distributions when exact production locations are unknown. This produces probable sourcing hotspots and estimated land requirements for individual raw materials. The resulting allocations are then linked to spatial biodiversity information at the same scale to estimate biodiversity impact hotspots along the supply chain.
First applications show that inferred impact patterns depend strongly on data traceability and on the production geography of individual commodities. Country-level sourcing data can conceal marked within-country heterogeneity, whereas more specific origin information improves ecological interpretation. The workflow provides a transparent basis for comparing raw materials, identifying priority sourcing regions and value-chain stages, and discussing key assumptions and uncertainties in biodiversity assessments of food supply chains.

Speaker: Jan Kalusche (German Centre for Integrative Biodaiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), Helmholtz Centre for environmental research (UFZ))

Afternoon Sessions: Biodiversity & Human Well-Being

Conveners: Gemma Burgazzi (iDiv/UFZ), Louisa-Marie von Plüskow

60 Linking species selection, restoration objectives, and decision-making in the Nigerian drylands

Ecosystem restoration is a key strategy for mitigating biodiversity loss and climate change. In the Sahel, large-scale regreening aims to reverse desertification, increase vegetation cover, and enhance ecosystem functioning. These efforts often involve the introduction or re-establishment of plant species, but the selection of species and practices varies widely across projects. Although such projects play a major role in national environmental goals, little is known about how species are selected and affect project outcomes. Here, we analyse species adopted by multiple projects in Northern Nigeria to understand the rationale for their selection, decision-making process, and socio-ecological impacts of these choices. We combined field surveys, stakeholder interviews, and project reports to document and connect project objectives with species used in restoration projects in Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Adamawa, Yobe, Bauchi, and Gombe over the past 50 years. Our results indicate that, while projects historically relied on commercial exotic timber species, multipurpose native species are increasingly utilised, shifting objectives from the provision of industrial materials to landscape management and climate change mitigation. Our study indicates that species selection is influenced by goals defined by markets, donors, and global agendas, which are translated at the local scale through interactions among communities, farmers, nurseries, and project offices. We provide examples of long-term change that demonstrate how local economic, political, and ecological contexts reflect approaches to restoration. These insights can inform future restoration efforts across the Sahel, where scaling up successful models depends on aligning explicit goals with ecological knowledge and local practices.

Speaker: João de Deus Vidal Junior (Leipzig University, LeipzigLab, Leipzig)

61 Prioritising Biodiversity in Times of Multiple Challenges—Evidence from a Large-N Media Analysis

Biodiversity loss is a key challenge of our time, yet it competes for public attention with armed conflicts, pandemics, rising costs of living, migration, and other issues. Human cognitive capacity for processing information is inherently limited, meaning these concerns interact in complex ways, amplifying or crowding out one another in public discourse. Mass media play a pivotal role in shaping societal attention: topic prioritisation has real consequences for public awareness of and agency towards biodiversity. In my presentation, I will discuss how newspaper outlets prioritise biodiversity relative to other prevalent issues. Using automated quantitative content analysis with validated search terms, we examined the highest-circulation outlets in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Nigeria, and the United States over 2015–2025 (N=452,907). Our preliminary results show that biodiversity consistently receives the lowest media attention. Article volumes remain near zero regardless of global biodiversity milestones such as COP15. In contrast, other crises (notably COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine) generate sharp, event-driven spikes that further crowd out biodiversity in media agendas. This is in line with earlier studies on biodiversity, climate, and popular culture but reveals nuances across environmental and non-environmental challenges and diverse political-cultural contexts. The study provides large-N evidence for future research on human attention and behaviour.

Speaker: Mr Richard Völker (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

62 The Neurocognitive Architecture of Biodiversity Exposure: An Investigation of Neural Response Patterns towards Low and High Forest Diversity Sceneries.

More biodiverse nature confers a suite of mental health benefits, in particular when also perceived as such. There is, however, a substantial knowledge gap in how the human brain processes biodiversity, both measured and perceived, and how neural indicators provide insights into biodiversity-mental health linkages.
To test this, 52 participants between 18 and 35 years of age underwent four experimental conditions in a laboratory setting, whereby 5-minute presentations of photographs showing low vs. high forest diversity were compared to presentations of control photographs showing phase-scrambled versions of the original photosets (a low-scrambled and a high-scrambled condition). After each condition, a 3-tone auditory oddball paradigm was employed to measure attention. Continuous EEG recordings allowed for obtaining neurophysiological correlates of stress, attention and meditation-like states. We further asked participants to rate the photos according to perceived biodiversity.
We found that forest opposed to scrambled photos significantly increased early theta frequency band activity, indicative of inward directed attention associated with meditative or restorative states. Longer lasting shifts for the entire 5-minute photo viewing period were found for relaxation induced alpha that was increased as a function of greater diversity in both the forest and scrambled photos, and weakly by contrasting forests vs. scrambled photos. Visual event related potentials (ERPs) indicate differentiated neurocognitive patterns associated with the processing of forest vs. scrambled photographs. No differences between the conditions were found for auditory ERPs obtained through the oddball paradigm. Interestingly, perceived biodiversity had an effect on some of the tested neural makers, with the most consistent effects found for perceived plant species richness that was positively linked with early theta and attention-related auditory ERPs.
Forest photographs, particularly when perceived as more biodiverse, evoke brain signals that are associated with stress recovery, altered attention and meditation-like states. We therefore recommend to preserve and restore forest ecosystems to benefit human mental health while fostering indirect forest exposure in times of increased rural-urban migrations.

Speaker: Kevin Rozario (UFZ / iDiv / Uni Jena / Uni Leipzig)

Guided Tour: Botanical Garden

Guided Tour: Herbarium Haussknecht

Pau Hana at Botanical Garden

Guided Tour: Herbarium Haussknecht

Bus Shuttle Service

Wednesday 9 September

Bus Shuttle Service

Registration & Welcome Coffee

Workshops: Co-developing and evaluating scenarios for restoring landscape elements in agricultural regions across Europe

Conveners: A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert (BIOP - iDiv - UFZ), Guy Pe'er (UFZ / iDiv, department of Biodiversity and People), Jennifer Hauck (CoKnow)

63 Co-developing and evaluating scenarios for restoring landscape elements in agricultural regions across Europe

Landscape Features (LF) – such as hedgerows, flower strips, ponds, tree patches, and terraces – are key elements of agricultural landscapes that mediate biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and land-use intensity. As semi-natural structures in human-dominated systems, they contribute to habitat provision, ecosystem service delivery, and landscape connectivity. In the context of biodiversity loss, climate change, and competing land-use pressures, LF restoration is emerging as an important strategy for enhancing multifunctional and resilient agricultural regions.
The EU Horizon project LAFERIA (https://laferia-project.eu) investigates pathways for reintroducing landscape features across European agricultural regions, where one of seven case studies concentrates on agricultural areas around Leipzig. The project adopts a transdisciplinary approach involving farmers, landowners, municipalities, policymakers, civil society, and researchers in co-developing transformation pathways.
This workshop aims to advance and test methodological approaches for participatory scenario development in socio-ecological research, jointly with scientists interested in ecological and socio-ecological transformations in agricultural areas. The workshop conceptualizes landscape transformation as a multi-scalar process linking biodiversity patterns, ecosystem functions, and land-use governance, aiming to strengthen scenario-based analytical frameworks.
Participants will be invited to evaluate and refine draft LF restoration scenarios which are currently being developed based on seven European case study regions. After a short introduction, participants will divide into small groups to assess alternative scenarios using criteria related to biodiversity outcomes, ecosystem service provision, socio-economic feasibility, and governance constraints. We will thereby together explore alternative pathways and identify priorities for LF protection and restoration.
The workshop is tailored to iDiv researchers whose expertise in biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services, landscape ecology, and human dimensions of biodiversity are essential for strengthening socio-ecological assumptions underlying our scenarios and improving assessments of LF restoration potentials. In return, the workshop provides access to a multi-country European project, insights into European policies and an opportunity to participate in developing policy-relevant scenario framework linking biodiversity research with EU land-use transformation under the Common Agricultural Policy and the Nature Restoration Regulation.

Speakers: A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert (BIOP - iDiv - UFZ), Guy Pe'er (UFZ / iDiv, department of Biodiversity and People), Dr Jennifer Hauck (CoKnow)

Workshops: Grant Proposals for Coordinated Programmes

Conveners: Jan Schnitzler, Marten Winter (iDiv / UL)

64 Grant Proposals for Coordinated Programmes

This workshop is for all iDiv members & researchers involved in (or interested in) grant proposals for coordinated programmes driven by iDiv. We would like to give you the opportunity to present and discuss your ideas, gather feedback and connect with potential contributors. More information will follow.

If you would like to present your idea, please contact Marten Winter.

Speaker: Marten Winter (iDiv / UL)

Workshops: Take your biodiversity research to the next level with metabarcoding From project design to data analysis across diverse taxa and sequencing technologies An introduction to iBarc tools, services and collaborative opportunities

Conveners: Martina Herrmann (Friedrich Schiller University Jena, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), Cluster of Excellence „Balance of the Microverse“), María Mendez (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), Nadine Möbius (FSU Jena)

65 Take your biodiversity research to the next level with metabarcoding From project design to data analysis across diverse taxa and sequencing technologies An introduction to iBarc tools, services and collaborative opportunities

This workshop invites you to explore how metabarcoding can be used in your biodiversity research and provide new insights into biodiversity patterns and processes. It introduces the iBarc Support Unit and its services, spanning project planning, laboratory workflows, and bioinformatics across different taxonomic groups.
The first 45 minutes feature short talks, including an overview of iBarc and four research projects demonstrating how metabarcoding is applied across taxa using different sequencing technologies such as Illumina, Nanopore, and PacBio. These examples showcase current approaches within the iDiv network and iBarc and illustrate how molecular data can be translated into ecological insights.

The second half of the workshop focuses on interactive small-group discussions. You can bring your own questions or project ideas or simply join to listen and exchange. The aim is to foster discussion, explore potential collaborations, and, where relevant, dive into methodological and technical details.

Hands-on thinking, minds-on rounds (45 - 60 min)
Discuss your data, questions, and ideas in small groups.

Three thematic breakout groups will be offered, each led by members of the iBarc team:

o Working with your metabarcoding data: from data generation to analysis
o Quantifying biodiversity: making sense of metabarcoding data
o From field to lab: preparing your samples for metabarcoding

The workshop is open to all conference participants, particularly those interested in integrating metabarcoding into their research. It aims to encourage exchange, provide practical insights, and support the use of metabarcoding as a versatile tool in biodiversity and ecological research.

Speakers: Martina Herrmann (Friedrich Schiller University Jena, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), Cluster of Excellence „Balance of the Microverse“), María Mendez (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), Nadine Möbius (FSU Jena)

Workshops: Citizen Science – How To?

Conveners: Aletta Bonn (Helmholtz-Center for Environmental Research - UFZ / German Centre for integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) / Friedrich Schiller University Jena), Gemma Burgazzi (iDiv/UFZ), Louisa-Marie von Plüskow, Roland Bischof

66 Citizen Science – How To?

This session will be a hand-on session how to do good citizen science. There will be lightning-talks of ongoing citizen science projects, followed by a world cafe to exchange hands-on tips & tricks how to design, conduct and evaluate a citizen science project. How to engage volunteers and make it an enriching experience from a scientific, social and political transformational perspective. This will be a fun interactive session and hopefully be the start of an iDiv citizen science platform, to link up, exchange experiences and learn from each other. Everyone welcome, also if you’re not (yet) engaged in citizen science!

Speakers: Dr Gemma Burgazzi, Louisa-Marie von Plüskow, Prof. Aletta Bonn, Mr Roland Bischof

11:00 Coffee Break

Morning Sessions: Approaches

Conveners: Marius Munschek (iDiv), Stefan Knauß

67 A 30 m Forest Condition Time Series (2000–2022) Reveals Forest Drought Responses Across Germany

Climate change is increasing the drought frequency and intensity, placing growing pressure on forest ecosystems. Assessing forest responses to such disturbances requires observations that capture both fine spatial variability and long-term coverage of multiple disturbance events. Existing approaches rely either on tree-ring data, which are spatially sparse, or on remote sensing products that often lack either long-term coverage or sufficient spatial resolution to resolve small-scale disturbances. To address this gap we present a high-resolution (30 m) long-term time series of forest condition across Germany from 2000 to 2022. The dataset is based on a satellite fusion framework that combines Landsat and MODIS satellite observations to achieve both a high spatial and temporal resolution. Applying the already established Forest Condition Monitor Framework, we calculated the forest condition anomaly index (FCA) covering a 22-year time series. In contrast to many existing approaches, it accounts for species and region-specific reflectance behavior and natural phenological variability. Validation against forest loss products yields an F-score of 0.83 using a damage threshold of -0.15. Additionally, FCA shows strong agreement (concordance correlation coefficient of 0.85) with an existing Sentinel-2-based FCA dataset during the overlapping period. Results show that FCA changes correspond well with major drought events experienced in 2003, 2015, and 2018-2021. We further analyze relationships between drought response and biodiversity using the Shannon index derived from tree species distributions. The dataset enables large-scale analysis of forest condition dynamics and supports high-resolution investigations of forest responses to drought and other disturbances. The proposed framework is transferable and can be extended to understudied regions globally.

Speaker: Denis Streitmatter (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research GmbH - UFZ)

68 Extremes – for whom? Creating climatic envelopes for common tree species in Germany and the iDiv ARBOfun platform to assess departure from experienced climate during extreme events

Climate change triggers long-term changes in temperature and precipitation patterns, among others, but also increases the likelihood of anomalies, like extreme heat, cold, or drought. The common tree species growing in Germany as well as potential candidate species from other regions planted in the iDiv research platform ARBOfun differ in their native distributions and thus in the climatic conditions they experienced in the past. Combining distribution data from GBIF, the World Catalogue of Vascular Plants, World Plants, and global temperature and climatic water balance time series from ERA5, we show for which of the most relevant current and future tree species in Germany climatic extremes translate to unprecedented environmental conditions, potentially affecting short- and long-term growth and survival.

Speaker: David Schellenberger Costa (iDiv Halle-Leipzig-Jena, Leipzig University)

69 Patterns of ecological marginality in regional plant extinctions

Understanding the patterns and drivers of plant extinction is crucial for anticipating biodiversity dynamics under ongoing global change. Species niches, defined in geographic and climatic space, and particularly species’ positions within niche space are known to influence regional extinction. Thus, regional extinctions are unlikely to be evenly distributed across niche space due to variation in optimal and suboptimal conditions along niche gradients.
Here, we investigate how plant species’ positions in niche space influence extinction risk. We test whether regional extinctions occur at niche margins, as predicted by the abundant center hypothesis (i.e., extinctions moving inward as conditions diverge from optima), or across the niche space, as proposed by the contagion hypothesis , where habitat transformation may create marginal fragments. Using a newly integrated dataset of harmonized regional Red Lists of plant species worldwide, expert range maps, and climatic data, we estimated the geographic and climatic niche space of 399 plant species and quantified the marginality of regional extinctions within this space.
Our preliminary results show that regional plant extinctions do not follow a single pattern. Marginal extinctions suggest that some plant species may be more vulnerable under less optimal climatic and habitat conditions, whereas extinctions occurring at the core or throughout niche space may indicate the influence of human-driven pressures (e.g., habitat transformation), which can force species to persist in peripheral areas. This variability suggests that extinction dynamics are shaped by a combination of ecological constraints and anthropogenic pressures, whose relative importance may differ among species. By integrating geographic and environmental dimensions of niche space, our study helps clarify how regional extinction risk is distributed across species’ ranges, thereby supporting conservation efforts.

Speaker: Paola Barajas Barbosa (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Department of Community Ecology, Halle (Saale), Germany)

70 Effects of Restoration Methods on Woody Plant and Bird Diversity in the Sidama Region, Ethiopia.

Abstract
Land degradation and subsequent biodiversity loss are serious environmental problems, especially in Ethiopia where soil erosion is high and the human population is rapidly growing. Exclosures to prevent heavy grazing either by passive restoration (natural regeneration without planting) or active restoration (with planting) are widely used as methods to restore biodiversity, but their effects on tree and bird biodiversity across different spatial scales (alpha, beta and gamma) and vegetation layers are not well documented. This study investigated the effects of restoration methods on woody plant and bird diversity in the Sidama Region, Ethiopia. In this study, we collected vegetation and bird data from 13 sites: five exclosures without planting (passive), and three exclosures with planting (active), and five adjacent open grazing land sites (controls) using transects and point counts. We analyzed alpha, beta, and gamma diversity and composition for trees (juvenile vs. adult trees) and birds and compared patterns between passive, active and open sites. Alpha diversity of both taxa was higher in restored sites, especially under passive restoration. However, after rarefaction, these differences disappeared, meaning increases in alpha diversity in restored sites were mainly due to increases in abundance. We also found significant differences in community composition among treatments for trees and birds. Gamma diversity for trees and birds was also highest in restored sites and lowest in open sites, and rank abundance results indicated more even communities in restored sites compared to open sites. In conclusion, our study shows that both active and passive restoration improved biodiversity and community structure compared to open grazing land, and restored sites must continue protected from heavy grazing and disturbance to support the recovery of woody plant and bird biodiversity.

Speaker: Aklilu Wola (UFZ/MLU/iDiv)

71 Advancing Subsurface Soil Moisture Monitoring: A Multivariate ERT Calibration for Root Zone Moisture and Tree Water Use Dynamics

Automated monitoring of root-zone soil moisture is essential for understanding tree water use and early drought stress. This study deployed an automated ERT time-lapse system along a transect with 100 electrodes at 0.5 m spacing, acquiring measurements every 8 hours in the ARBOfun Großpösna. A preprocessing workflow ensured data reliability, including removal of rainfall- and snow-affected measurements, outlier filtering, and temperature normalization. ERT data were integrated with meteorological observations and ten soil moisture sensors at 15 cm and 50 cm depths. Only sensors with strong correlation to ERT signals were retained (sensors 2, 6, and 7; R² > 0.32). Using paired observations (n = 420), univariate and multivariate regression models were evaluated. Multivariate models incorporating soil temperature consistently outperformed univariate models. At 15 cm, the multivariate model achieved R² = 0.77 (RMSE = 3.32%), compared to R² = 0.57 for univariate. At 50 cm, the multivariate model reached R² = 0.86 (RMSE = 2.86%), outperforming the univariate model (R² = 0.60).
Calibrated models were applied to the full ERT time series to derive continuous soil moisture profiles. Results show automated ERT can estimate root-zone soil moisture with ~80% accuracy, enabling detection of seasonal drying patterns and early tree water stress indicators.

Speaker: Dr KHALDOUN S.A ABUALHIN (Postdoc Scientific Researcher)

72 ORCHIDACEAE AS A GLOBAL MODEL FOR BIODIVERSITY–CHEMODIVERSITY MISMATCHES AND BIOGEOGRAPHIC RESEARCH GAPS

Natural products (NPs) remain a major source of bioactive molecules, yet chemical exploration of biodiversity is highly uneven across plant lineages and ecosystems. Orchidaceae, one of the largest and most diverse plant families, is ecologically and economically prominent, but its global chemodiversity and associated research biases have not been systematically quantified. In this work, we integrate NP occurrence data from multiple sources with taxonomic harmonization, phylogenetic structure, chemical classification, and biogeographic distributions to generate a biodiversity-informed global map of chemical knowledge across Orchidaceae. A genus-level dataset of orchid NPs was compiled from NPASS and LOTUS records and harmonized against WCVP/POWO to identify distinct clades. Likewise, bioactivity profiles were retrieved from ChEMBL, structural classes were assigned via NPClassifier and functional signals were contextualized across GBIF/WWF ecoregions. Notably, Phalaenopsis emerges as a striking case, being simultaneously associated with a cold clade and an under-researched genus despite its prominence and economic relevance. Structural patterns further reveal strong lineage-specific biases, including the prominence of phenanthrene-related chemistry alongside other recurrent but less represented NP classes. Biogeographic analyses show that orchid richness peaks in Indonesia-Papua and the Neotropics, particularly in Tropical-Subtropical Moist Broadleaf Forests as well as Andean Montane and Cloud Forests, whereas chemical knowledge remains concentrated in a more restricted set of better-studied lineages and regions. In this context, Vanilla provides a complementary example: despite its prominence and broad distribution, currently documented chemistry captures only a narrow fraction of its wider biodiversity, and the contrast between Java and Cuba illustrates a potentially broader Indomalayan–Neotropical asymmetry in phytochemical reporting. Together, our results show that chemical discovery in Orchidaceae has not kept pace with biodiversity. We propose a biodiversity-informed framework for mapping chemodiversity and research gaps that can be generalized to other taxonomic groups, providing a quantitative basis for more efficient and evolution-aware NP discovery.

Speaker: Andrés Felipe Vásquez (Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB-Halle))

Morning Sessions: Complexity

Conveners: Michael Gerth (German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig & Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), Robert Rauschkolb (Friedrich Schiller University, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP) Jena)

73 Plant macrophenological dynamics - synchronisation revealed by citizen science data

Phenological changes are key indicators of climate change. While most studies focus on individual species, plant macrophenology examines large-scale patterns and processes in the timing of plant life cycle events, such as flowering, across extensive spatial and temporal scales. Traditional methods often struggle to capture the complexity of these patterns. To address this, we developed a novel methodological approach using nonlinear dimension reduction, which effectively extracts spatio-temporal ecological gradients from large and diverse datasets.
Our approach quantifies synchronised behaviour across thousands of plant occurrence observations, revealing how plants respond to intra-annual variablity at macroecological scales. We demonstrate our approach using datasets collected by citizen scientists via the Flora Incognita plant identification app (10 million observations in Germany, 2018-2021). This analysis shows that synchronised group behaviour during the growing season is compressible into a few ecological gradients, while synchrony deteriorates outside the growing season.
We propose linking these findings to other observations such as satellite or botanical garden observations. This framework advances plant macrophenology, providing researchers with practical tools to quantify climate change effects on plant life cycles.

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/2041-210X.14365

Speaker: Karin Mora (Institute for Earth System Science and Remote Sensing, Leipzig University)

74 Warming reduces phenological synchrony among perennial herbaceous assemblages

Plant phenology is a key determinant of species performance and ecosystem functioning. While most phenological studies focus on individual species, assemblage-level patterns remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated how temperature and species’ habitat preferences shape the synchrony of vegetative and reproductive phenology among perennial herbaceous assemblages across temperate regions.

We analysed a dataset comprising phenological observations of 510 perennial herbaceous species recorded between 2020 and 2025 in 17 botanical gardens across the Northern Hemisphere. These gardens represent artificial assemblages spanning a mean annual temperature gradient of 15 °C. We quantified synchrony of three phenophases—leaf unfolding, flowering onset, and whole flowering—using circular statistics. Additionally, we grouped species into ecologically coherent groups based on habitat preferences (light, water, and nitrogen availability) to assess adaptations to environmental influences on synchrony.
Leaf unfolding was consistently more synchronous within assemblages than reproductive phenology. Synchrony in all three phenophases declined significantly with increasing temperature across the studied gradient, independent of species composition and species richness. Furthermore, species associated with resource-poor habitats exhibited higher synchrony in flowering phenology, whereas leaf unfolding synchrony did not vary among habitats.
Our study provides novel large-scale evidence that warming alters not only the individual timing but also the coordination of phenological events within multispecies assemblages. The findings indicate that warming-induced declines in phenological synchrony may have consequences for biotic interactions in natural plant communities. The influence of habitat preferences highlights the role of evolutionary adaptation in shaping phenological responses.

Speaker: Robert Rauschkolb

75 The individualised niche in motion; estimating individual niche variation with movement data

The ecological niche concept has shifted in the last decades from broad species-level definitions to include individual-level specialisation. Individuals within a species often differ consistently in behaviour, physiology, and habitat use, giving rise to ‘individualised niches’. These niches can emerge through niche choice, construction, or conformance and are shaped by intrinsic (e.g. condition, cognition) and extrinsic (e.g. social environment, resource distribution) factors. Building on Hutchinson’s niche framework, I propose a method to operationalise individualised niches using simulated and real-world individual GPS tracking data. I distinguish between realised and potential individual niches and explore how intraspecific variation can be quantified through niche overlap and breadth. My approach offers a scalable framework to analyse intraspecific variation and their consequences for population and community-level processes. Understanding individualised niches is essential to link behavioural ecology with conservation and global change biology, and to estimate the success of translocations and rewilding projects.

Speaker: Elina Takola

76 Climatic niche properties interact with land-use in predicting plant responses to climate variability in a global change experiment

Experimental ecology and macroecology both contribute to predicting species’ responses to climate change, yet each has limitations. Recent integrative studies have shown that even coarse characterization of species’ climatic niche can help explain plant responses to experimental climate manipulations. Nevertheless, interactions between local factors, such as land-use, and the broader macroecological climate context remain insufficiently explored. This gap can be addressed using the Global Change Experimental Facility (Central Germany), where climate is realistically manipulated through seasonal shifts across land-use types (mown meadows vs. grazed grasslands). Based on 10 years of plant cover and biomass data, one can also assess the influence of background interannual climate variability, including severe drought years. In this study, we projected local climatic conditions into cautiously characterized European climatic niches to derive distances from niche optima. No consistent relationship emerged between these distances and responses to experimental climate manipulation, as most species showed weak responses. In contrast, interannual variability was consistent with niche theory: species abundance declined with increasing distance from the niche optimum in summer, but not in spring. This negative relationship was weaker in pastures than in meadows, likely due to greater environmental heterogeneity and stochasticity buffering climate effects. Moreover, the species most negatively affected were those farthest from their niche optima under local conditions. Overall, grassland species responded rapidly to year-to-year climatic variation during the critical summer period, and the responses were predictable from climatic niches. Notably, land-use management modulated this predictive power. We therefore advocate for more integrative approaches that combine macroecological properties with experimental data to improve forecasts of biodiversity responses to climate change.

Speaker: Thibault Coquery (Department of Species Interaction Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany, Department of Community Ecology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Halle, Germany, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany, Department Geobotany and Botanical Garden, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany)

77 Order Statistics as a Basis for Modelling Species Abundance Patterns

The species abundance distribution (SAD) is a fundamental representation of biodiversity, describing both the number of species in a community and the allocation of individuals among them. In contrast to the species–area relationship (SAR), which is inherently scale-dependent, the SAD is typically examined at a fixed spatial scale, despite the fact that its form must vary with sampling extent. In this study, we explicitly frame the SAD as a scaling phenomenon. Building on order statistics, we introduce a set of functions $S_m(A)$, where $S_1(A)$ corresponds to the classical SAR and $S_m(A)$ denotes the number of species with at least $m$ individuals within area $A$. The abundance distribution at scale A can then be expressed as differences $C_m(A) = S_m(A) - S_{m+1}(A)$. We demonstrate that the functions $S_m(A)$ exhibit scaling behaviour analogous to the SAR, including three distinct regimes. When the corresponding $C_m(A)$ are visualized on a logarithmic scale, they tend to converge toward similar richness levels, though at progressively larger spatial scales. To our knowledge, this regularity has not been previously documented and points to a connection between the scaling of abundance distributions and the spatial arrangement of individuals within species. We further show that the approach of these scale-dependent SADs toward their large-area limit can be summarized through distance measures between distributions across scales, offering a coarse-grained characterization of convergence. Importantly, this behaviour depends on whether the sampled area captures the largest-scale regime of the SAR. Together, these findings highlight the inherently scale-dependent nature of the SAD and provide a unified framework for relating patterns of species abundance to spatial scaling in biodiversity.

Speaker: Luis Borda de Agua (iDiv)

78 Characterizing and predicting mammal communities using camera trap and remote sensing data

Changes in species composition (beta diversity) provide key insights into the ecological processes structuring communities. Identifying the drivers of beta diversity is essential for predicting how communities may reorganize under increasing anthropogenic pressures.
Here, we present a workflow that integrates camera-trap observations with remote-sensing data to model and predict spatial and temporal patterns of mammal community turnover. We combine hierarchical N-mixture models to derive abundance proxies that account for imperfect detection across species, camera stations, years, and seasons, with generalized dissimilarity models to explicitly model beta diversity. This framework allows community dissimilarity and uniqueness to be quantified and mapped across heterogeneous landscapes.
We apply our workflow to a Mediterranean ecosystem, the Doñana National Park in southwestern Spain, to illustrate its methodological potential. First, we show that incorporating proxies of mammal species abundances, rather than presence-only data, substantially improves explanatory power and enhances our ability to explain variation in beta diversity. Second, we identify the main drivers of mammal community turnover in the study region, namely habitat heterogeneity, distance to permanent water sources, and the proportion of bare soil. Third, we demonstrate shifts in community composition associated with the presence of domestic species, particularly free-ranging horses.
Overall, this workflow allows the use of camera-trap data to infer spatial patterns in community composition, identify areas hosting distinct unique assemblages, assess the influence of domestic or invasive species on native communities, and forecast community-level responses to land-use modification and climate change.

Speaker: Dr Pedro Mittelman (iDiv/MLU)

Morning Sessions: Transdisciplinary

Conveners: A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert (BIOP - iDiv - UFZ), Gavin Stark (iDiv/MLU)

79 180 years later: Inferring long-term distributional changes in Bavarian wildlife from a historical biodiversity survey

Understanding long-term distributional changes of species is essential for effective conservation and biodiversity management, as well as for avoiding shifting baselines in ecological research. Historical sources—including archival documents, maps, oral histories, and paleoecological evidence—can help reconstruct past ecological patterns and processes. In this study we assessed long-term incidence changes of 42 selected vertebrate species in Bavaria forest districts by comparing a historical biodiversity survey from 1845 with modern species occurrence and monitoring data. Of the 42 species examined, 22 showed increases and 18 decreases in incidence. Apex predators such as the wolf and lynx generally increased, whereas mesopredators like martens declined. Species associated with aquatic habitats, including large waterbirds such as the mute swan, common crane, and white stork, exhibited strong increases, while the Eurasian otter declined markedly. Herbivores showed variable trends, with red deer displaying the strongest decline and now being largely restricted to designated “red deer habitats.” Migratory birds tended to increase, whereas sedentary forest birds such as the black grouse and western capercaillie declined. Species occurring at higher elevations showed more negative incidence changes. Overall, long-term incidence changes in Bavaria are heterogeneous and influenced by trophic role, habitat association, migration behavior, and elevation. Our findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between long- and short-term trends in conservation assessments and underscore the value of integrating historical ecology into biodiversity research and management.

Speaker: Thore Engel (iDiv, Uni Jena, UFZ)

80 Monitoring ecological integrity to guide ecosystem restoration

Ecological integrity has become a central objective in international and national conservation and restoration policies, yet its practical definition and monitoring remain highly heterogeneous. Here, we review how ecological integrity is defined and measured across ecosystems and scales, and identify key challenges in translating broad conceptual definitions into operational indicators. Definitions of ecological integrity generally converge around three recurring elements: ecosystem composition, structure and function; reference conditions; and resilience. However, approaches differ in whether integrity is assessed through ecosystem attributes directly or inferred from the absence of anthropogenic pressures. Likewise, indicators vary greatly depending on ecosystem type, spatial scale, data availability and management objectives. Local assessments often rely on field-based measures of ecosystem components, while regional to global assessments increasingly depend on remote sensing and human pressure proxies. As spatial extent increases, monitoring feasibility improves but ecological specificity often declines. We show that this mismatch between holistic definitions and selective indicators is driven not only by conceptual ambiguity, but also by practical constraints such as data availability, monitoring costs and policy requirements. Reference conditions further complicate assessments, as they involve historical, spatial and normative choices that can strongly influence interpretations of integrity. We argue that no single indicator can adequately capture ecological integrity and that portfolio approaches combining pressure, state, function and resilience indicators are more informative. Rewilding provides a particularly relevant test case because it targets ecosystem processes, trophic complexity and stochastic disturbance regimes at broad spatial and temporal scales. Overall, improving ecological integrity monitoring will require clearer monitoring objectives, explicit reference frameworks, and greater investment in long-term and spatially explicit ecological data collection.

Speaker: Magali Weissgerber (MLU / iDiv)

81 TripleBird: Projecting Biodiversity Futures to Guide Nature-Positive Decisions

Long-term effective management of ecosystems, such as forests, requires integrating ecological principles with diverse societal demands and values. Yet, such an approach is hampered by a disconnect between large-scale biodiversity monitoring data and the practical needs of decision-makers. There is an urgent need for predictive tools that can project biodiversity consequences of different management and policy actions. To address this challenge, the TripleBird project has been launched to develop integrated, science-based decision-support tools, building on long-term avian monitoring data to provide actionable knowledge for ecosystem management. The project's architecture integrates three core pillars. Its foundation is BirdTwin, a digital twin of German and European bird communities builts on large-scale and long-term monitoring data. BirdFutures then utilizes this digital twin to co-design biodiversity scenarios with stakeholders, allowing for the evaluation of policy interventions, conservation, and restoration activities effects on bird species and communities. Finally, BirdBusiness ensures these scientific insights are translated into usable applications for practitioners in business, finance, and politics, such as for sustainability reporting, target setting, and transition planning. This presentation will introduce the TripleBird and provide a critical starting point to align scientific model development with practitioner needs. At the heart of the TripleBird project is a deep commitment to co-production, moving beyond traditional science communication to foster a collaborative and iterative dialogue with stakeholders. Through continuous engagement, we will ensure our methods and outputs are driven by real-world needs. This collaborative process is essential to (1) clearly identify priority management objectives across different sectors, (2) co-define biodiversity indicators that are not only scientifically robust but also decision-relevant and practical to implement, and (3) incorporate invaluable local knowledge to ground-truth and refine our large-scale ecological models. Our ultimate goal is to provide the robust, transparent, and credible projections of biodiversity consequences that are an essential prerequisite for designing and implementing effective pathways towards a nature-positive future.

Speaker: Tatiane Micheletti (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ)

82 Illuminating Africa’s plant diversity dark spots: NaijaFLO

Africa harbours an exceptional diversity of plant life, yet major knowledge gaps remain regarding both species discovery and species distributions. These limitations, commonly referred to as the Linnean and Wallacean shortfalls, constrain our ability to conduct reliable biogeographical analyses, evaluate conservation priorities, and assess extinction risks.
Here, we present the Database of Vascular Plants of Nigeria (NaijaFLO) as an example of how curated botanical databases can help reduce such gaps. Developed at iDiv in collaboration with an international network of specialists, NaijaFLO provides an expert-reviewed and continuously curated checklist of the vascular flora of Nigeria. The database combines information from major taxonomic reference systems together with herbarium specimens to verify plant names, classifications, and occurrence records. In addition to taxonomic and nomenclatural information, NaijaFLO documents distributional status and growth forms, while ensuring open accessibility through global biodiversity infrastructures.
We highlight the importance of herbarium-based national and regional plant databases as essential tools for addressing biodiversity knowledge gaps across Africa. By harmonising taxonomy, validating occurrence data, and connecting local datasets to international platforms, initiatives such as NaijaFLO contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of African plant diversity and strengthen the foundation for conservation planning and biogeographical research. Expanding herbarium capacity, supporting the next generation of botanists, and encouraging cross-border scientific collaboration will be crucial for advancing comparable efforts throughout the continent.

Speaker: Alexandra Müllner-Riehl

83 Why is it important to understand how differently various organisms hear?

Noise pollution is an often-overlooked but significant factor contributing to the loss of biodiversity. It disrupts many biological processes, for example by increasing the energy required for communication, masking signals that are important for mating or warning, driving individuals away from feeding grounds, disrupting orientation, temporarily impairing hearing, or even causing damage to the ears of individual animals. Investigating the specific hearing abilities of species can provide taxon-specific information that is useful for comparative analyses in bioacoustics, for impact assessments, and for the taxon-specific parameterisation of noise propagation models. Noise propagation models are frequently used in urban planning to assess noise-affected areas and to design regulatory or structural noise abatement measures. To date, they have been used exclusively for modelling based on human hearing capabilities. As part of the EU project PLAN-B (https://plan-b-project.eu/), we have compiled data from nearly 490 audiograms of 316 species from 112 families of insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals into a database, developed a statistical approach to harmonisation, carried out comparative analyses, and demonstrated how differences in species-specific hearing abilities affect the results of noise propagation models. The implications for our understanding of species-specific perception of the environment and the application of this knowledge to environmental impact assessments, nature conservation and the design of mitigation measures are described.

Speaker: Dr Reinhard Klenke (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Institut für Biologie, Geobotanik und Botanischer Garten)

84 Effects of proximity to human-associated infrastructure on infant development in the Critically Endangered crested macaques (Macaca nigra) on Sulawesi, Indonesia

Anthropogenic landscape change increasingly brings wildlife into close proximity to humans and human-associated infrastructure, yet little is known about how its effects early social development in non-human primates. Because infancy represents a key developmental stage during which social interactions shape behavioral competence, disturbance during this period may have important consequences for later life. Here, we investigated whether spatial proximity to human-associated infrastructure (HAI) influences infant social development in crested macaques (Macaca nigra), a critically endangered and highly social tolerant primate species endemic to Sulawesi, Indonesia. The study was conducted in three habituated groups at Tangkoko Nature Reserve that differed in their distance to HAI (roads and beaches) and in their group composition (e.g. group size, infant-adults ratio, etc.) which may provide a different degree of protection against HAI. Using behavioral and GPS data from 35 infants collected between 2008-2010, we quantified how the frequency of social interactions such as grooming, play, and agonistic interactions varied with distance to HAI across the first year of infant life. Overall, proximity to HAI did not significantly affect the frequency of infant social behavior. Affiliative interactions such as grooming showed only a weak tendency to increase with distance from infrastructure, while agonistic interactions did not vary across the study area. In contrast, playing differed significantly among the three groups rather than with distance to HAI. Specifically, infants from the group closest to HAI engaged in more play than infants of groups further away. These findings suggest that group-specific characteristics may play a stronger role in shaping infant social behavior than spatial proximity to HAI. The species’ tolerant social system may additionally buffer infants from potential effects of HAI. However, future studies incorporating direct measures of human presence, like human-wildlife encounters, may help clarify potential risks of human disturbance on infant social development.

Speaker: Rija Andriamifidy (University of Leipzig and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Lunch Break & Poster Session

85 European Topic Centre Biodiversity and Ecosystems: Benefits and challenges of assisting policy development and implementation as expert contractors to the EU

In 2023, our research group stepped out of the academic comfort zone and became a key partner in the European Topic Centre Biodiversity and Ecosystems (ETC BE), which advises and assists the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the European Commission (EC) in devising and implementing biodiversity-related policy.
The contracted term for the ETC BE ends this year and the wider European Topic Centre model will be reshaped. This presents an ideal moment to reflect on our experiences, and, crucially, the lessons that can be learned from them.
Our participation had numerous benefits. For example, it allowed us to use our expertise to help shape policy and promote its implementation, thus having a tangible impact on European biodiversity conservation. Our participation also allowed us to gain deeper insights into procedures and attitudes across policy levels and to build important working relationships. However, different priorities and mindsets between us as researchers and the EEA or EC staff were apparent. Scientists had a tendency to want to add novel aspects and strive for ideal outcomes. Conversely, EEA and EC staff were more likely to be pragmatic about what can be done given Member State’s attitudes and previous legal precedents, tending towards using established procedures. Deadlines were sometimes unrealistic and needed changing. Administrative requirements and a model where the scope and extent of tasks and funding were negotiated yearly, were an ill fit to academic practices and made it risky to hire staff intended to work predominantly on this project. Politics delayed the start of the work on the Nature Restoration Regulation and affected other tasks in various ways. Overall, the experience was positive, though often demanding.

Speaker: Brigitte Braschler (iDiv and Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg)

86 Which fungi images matter for identification? Evaluating image perspectives for CNN-based fungal classification through latent space feature analysis

With an estimated 5 million species, fungi represent a remarkably diverse kingdom of life. They play important roles in ecosystems, through nutrient acquisition for symbiotic plant partners, providing habitat for insects by breaking down deadwood and debris in forests. While fungal species are increasingly threatened by human activities such as land use change, nitrogen leaching and pollution, policies protecting biodiversity focus mainly on animals and plant species. This gap in policy is likely due to a lack of awareness about fungal species in the general public and limited data on abundance and distribution of most fungal species. Automated identification applications can help to address both problems by raising awareness through enabling rapid identification from images and large-scale opportunistic data acquisition by citizen scientists. However, these applications need to be reliable in their predictions for them to be useful for identification and conservation purposes. Computer vision models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) drive the predictions in identification apps, but it is not yet well understood what kinds of images are most useful for training these models to improve their accuracy. In the field, trained mycologists look at different macroscopic traits of fungal fruiting bodies to identify species, and these could be similar or different from the features that CNNs extract to make predictions. To test what kinds of image perspectives are useful for training CNNs, we designed a study for which we are collecting a systematic dataset looking at up to 9 different pre-defined perspectives for 4 morphological groups of mushroom-forming fungal species (bracket/shelf, gilled bell-shaped, gilled convex/plane/funnel, and boletes). Preliminary results from the early 2026 field season will be presented, with implications for best practice image collection and training protocols for the models powering fungal identification applications.

Speaker: Diane Cooke (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry)

87 Speaking louder than words: An actionable communication framework supporting evidence-informed biodiversity policy

Disagreements persist over how to increase the uptake of scientific evidence in biodiversity conservation policy-making. Communication experts recommend using dialogical and participatory practices over linear dissemination of research outcomes. Current science-policy interface scholarship, however, lacks insights from theoretical developments in science communication, which support scientists in implementing a full range of communication goals, including promoting, informing, persuading, and co-creating actionable knowledge. To fill this gap, we use a three-stage approach: developing the Science-Policy Interface Communication for the Environment (SPICE) Actionable Framework based on interdisciplinary literature; mapping recommendations for improving biodiversity-science uptake through a rapid review; and analyzing these recommendations using the SPICE Framework to demonstrate their usefulness. The SPICE Framework consists of five models: Policy-oriented Dissemination; the more personalized Policymaker-oriented Dissemination; effective two-way Dialogue; Collaboration and Participation in creating knowledge together; and a novel Supporting model focusing on building relations and trust. Reviewing the literature using the SPICE Framework reveals gaps in guidance on presenting biodiversity loss as a policy-relevant issue. Dissemination is supported by many more recommendations than either dialogue or participation. Practices convey strategies for tailoring messages to policymakers' interests and nurturing relationships of trust, but overlook the hostile political environments that scientists frequently encounter. As a result, scientists may lack tools to effectively promote dialogue and collaboration or communicate successfully within confrontational and partisan political environments, particularly when addressing conservation policy. This study highlights the need for interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to support robust recommendations for science-policy communicators, with a particular focus on sustainability and environmental policy.

Speaker: Dr Naama Teschner (Ben-Gurion University)

88 Text-Enhanced Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Species Classification

Biodiversity monitoring provides essential insights into ecosystem dynamics, enabling informed decision-making for conservation and sustainable development. A key component of this effort is the automated classification of species from imagery, a task where deep learning models have recently achieved significant progress. However, fine-grained visual classification remains a challenge when species from the same genus or family share nearly identical physical traits. To improve these distinctions, we propose a text-enhanced representation learning (TERL) framework that incorporates short, human-produced descriptive texts of a species' salient features as auxiliary information during training. The approach is motivated by the assumption that such textual descriptions provide complementary and often more discriminative cues than visual features alone. Our method teaches the model to link visual patterns with these descriptive traits, making it easier for the model to distinguish between look-alike species. TERL is model-agnostic and can be integrated with any deep learning-based visual classifier, leading to model decision-making that is better aligned with human perception. Notably, the method requires text supervision only during the training phase. Since there is no additional computational overhead during inference, the final model remains a fast, image-only tool that is readily applicable for field researchers. We evaluate the approach on fine-grained ecological images, including camera trap images of moths collected as part of the LEPMON project.

Speaker: Christian Ickler

89 A Novel Tool for the Extraction of Plant Phenology from Digitized Herbarium Specimens

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 collections of important historic information. However, extracting information relevant for research, like phenological information, from such collections manually is a considerable challenge, which is why significant digitization efforts are taking place to enable faster processing. Unfortunately, although digitized herbarium specimens contain large amounts of phenology-relevant visual and textual information, automated approaches to extract phenological data from specimen images are still very limited.
We introduce a novel tool based on artificial neural networks to automatically extract phenological information from images of herbarium specimens. With this method, it will be possible to extract phenological information for large numbers of herbarium specimens without manual effort at high throughput and speed, which will enable further research on plant phenology from historical to present observations. Moreover, we develop the tool to be applicable to many different plant species without the need to supply own data or re-train the model on novel species.
The system is developed in interdisciplinary cooperation between biologists and computer scientists.

Speaker: Dr Matthias Körschens (Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP) Jena)

90 Augmenting plant-pollinator interaction monitoring with AI: computer-vision pipelines from smartphones and camera traps to validation and analysis

Plant-pollinator interactions are a candidate Essential Biodiversity Variable (EBV) but remain absent from the eLTER Standard Observations and from the operational core of EuropaBON, largely because traditional sampling is labour-intensive, costly, and requires taxonomic expertise that is in increasingly short supply. The Nature Restoration Regulation and the proposed EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme recently created a legally backed demand for scalable, standardised data. In response, the Species Interaction Ecology (SIE) group at iDiv (UFZ and MLU) has developed integrated computer-vision pipelines designed to augment (not replace) traditional methods, enabling dense spatiotemporal observations and lower per-site costs.
This poster synthesises several interconnected components. For field acquisition, we developed an open-source smartphone time-lapse protocol alongside Insect Detect DIY camera traps (with on-device real-time detection and tracking) and a night-vision variant for nocturnal pollinators. For detection and classification, we trained pollinator detectors for automated annotation and in-field deployment, and CNN image classifiers with uncertainty quantification for 15 European fly-pollinator families. For honest assessment, we performed an explicit out-of-distribution evaluation on smartphone images captured in field conditions, and within the SEPPI consortium (Biodiversa+), we compare automated and traditional sampling across eight European countries along various ecological gradients (e.g. altitude, restoration, fragmentation, land-use intensity). For fine-grained taxonomy, ongoing work targets Syrphidae genus and species classification.
We also contribute to community best-practice guidelines for insect sensing systems and are planning to extend the pipelines to PollObs within the PhenObs botanical-garden network (Jena, Halle, Leipzig).
Code, trained models, technical documentation, and protocols are openly available. We welcome ecological use cases, image datasets, taxonomic expertise, and dialogue with monitoring schemes, conservation practitioners, land managers and other stakeholders on which biodiversity indicators they need to deliver, so AI tools can be co-designed with end users.

Speaker: Dr Valentin Ștefan (iDiv & UFZ)

91 The illusion of diversity: sampling design drives conflicting estimates of soil richness across bacterial and eukaryotic communities

Soil communities harbour exceptional diversity across the tree of life, yet their richness remains systematically underestimated due to methodological constraints in field sampling and sequencing. Physical homogenization of multiple soil cores into composite samples is standard practice in soil ecology, under the assumption that mixing more cores better captures plot-level diversity. However, the consequences of this practice for diversity estimation, and whether they differ across prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities, remain poorly understood.
We sampled 57 forest and grassland sites across three regions in Germany using a standardized 14-core cross-transect design and performed 16S and 18S rRNA gene metabarcoding on individual cores and physically homogenized composite samples. This allowed us to compare how sampling effort, physical homogenization, and sequencing depth standardization influence diversity estimates across bacterial and eukaryotic soil communities, which differ fundamentally in body size, spatial distribution, and dispersal capacity.
Plot-level richness increased continuously with sampling effort in both community types, with no evidence of saturation. Physically homogenized composite samples substantially underestimated plot-level richness and altered apparent diversity relationships between ecosystems in both datasets. However, the magnitude and direction of these biases differed between bacteria and eukaryotes, reflecting differences in spatial heterogeneity and body size distributions across community types.
These results demonstrate that sampling effort and homogenization fundamentally shape diversity estimates across soil kingdoms, and that the consequences are not uniform across community types. We recommend sequencing individual cores rather than composite samples and scaling sequencing depth to sampling effort, with particular attention to the body size distribution of the target community.

Speaker: Maria Kostakou (UFZ Leipzig)

92 The iDiv Data Portal’s Contributions to FAIR, Open, and Reproducible Research

Journals and funders increasingly require researchers to publish all outputs of their work, given the essential role in impactful and reproducible science. For data and code in particular, the effectiveness of publishing these materials depends greatly on their quality, which is heavily influenced by its documentation. At iDiv, researchers can publish data and code at the iDiv Data Portal, a curated repository of public datasets related to iDiv research. Our datasets have been downloaded thousands of times in recent years, making the portal one of the main channels for disseminating knowledge produced at iDiv.
In this poster, I will show how the iDiv Data Portal and the Data, Stats & Code Unit (DSC) can help increase the reach and impact of your research. I detail how curation works and improves your data and code through the simple act of having a fresh set of informed eyes reviewing it before the critical phase of article publication. I will also show how, through the BEXIS management system, curated datasets are assigned DOIs and usage licenses, ensuring researchers receive appropriate credit for their work. Dataset versioning further supports good scientific practice by allowing datasets to evolve transparently over time. Together, these features support the production of FAIR-compliant, Open, and reproducible research at iDiv.

Speaker: Ludmilla Figueiredo (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity - iDiv)

93 Effects of Tree Diversity on Litter Dwellers During Early Decomposition

Litter decomposition is a key process in terrestrial ecosystems, representing the primary mechanism of carbon turnover and driving the cycling of nutrients such as nitrogen and sulfur. In addition to nutrient release, decomposition influences soil structure by affecting porosity, aeration, and the distribution of organic matter within the soil environment. This process involves an interconnected system comprising litter transformation by soil fauna, enzymatic activity of the microbiome, and the leaching of water-soluble compounds, all of which strongly depend on abiotic conditions and litter quality. Consequently, mixed litter may alter microbial communities and litter-dwelling fauna. However, despite increasing interest in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships, most studies have focused on microbial communities, while the effects of plant diversity on litter-associated fauna remain comparatively understudied. We hypothesized that tree species richness, together with decomposition stage, would influence the species composition and richness of Quercus petraea leaf litter-associated soil fauna. To test these hypotheses, we investigated soil fauna within the MyDiv biodiversity-ecosystem functioning experiment, sampling seven plots representing three diversity levels (oak-only, oak +1 species, and oak +3 species). In each plot, soil fauna was collected from five sampling spots over three consecutive two-day sampling blocks. Soil fauna samples were characterized using COI-based DNA metabarcoding and sequenced using Illumina technology. Our findings suggest that tree diversity influences the composition (presence/absence of taxa) rather than the overall richness of litter dwellers during early decomposition stages. Community composition differed significantly across diversity levels and sampling time, with pairwise comparisons revealing significant differences between the first and third sampling periods. In contrast, alpha diversity was not significantly affected by diversity treatments. These findings highlight the importance of plant diversity in shaping belowground trophic interactions during early decomposition and suggest that increased diversity of plant-derived organic matter can modify litter-dweller community assembly, potentially influencing decomposition dynamics and ecosystem functioning.

Speaker: Diana Morales Fonseca (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig)

94 Why are some birds more window collision-prone than others?

Although more than 1,800 bird species worldwide are known to collide with windows, some species appear to be more susceptible to collisions than others. These “super-colliders” are distributed across the bird tree of life, but tend to cluster within a small subset of families such as Pigeons, Wood Warblers, Pittas, and New World Sparrows. To better understand why some species are more collision-prone than others, we conducted a meta-analysis using a large citizen/community science dataset of bird-window collision observations, filtered to exclude regions with low detection rates, to assess the correlation between collision frequency and avian life history traits. We additionally ran family-specific analyses to account for the fact that the drivers of bird collisions likely differ between different bird families. We extended our models to predict the likely collision risk of species from under-sampled parts of the world such as Australia and the Middle East. The results of our models allow us to identify regions where super-colliding species may be especially abundant and therefore in need of collision mitigation solutions.

Speaker: David Tan (iDiv)

95 Extreme weather variability and bird distribution dynamics in Central Europe

Understanding how species respond to increasing frequency of extreme weather events is important for predicting biodiversity change in a rapidly shifting climate. While long-term climatic trends are known to drive gradual range shifts, short-term redistribution of species in response to abrupt extremes remains less well quantified. In the first phase of this project, a dynamic occupancy modeling framework was developed to explore species responses to isolated and hypothetical extreme weather scenarios, indicating that extreme events can alter short-term distribution patterns.

Building on these results, the model is applied to empirical weather time series data to examine how historical climatic variability relates to species occupancy through time. Using monthly weather data from 2000–2018 together with species occurrence records, past occupancy dynamics are reconstructed and the influence of temporal weather variability on the short-term distribution of 132 bird species of conservation interest in Central Europe (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) is quantified.
Weather time series are incorporated as temporally explicit predictors within the dynamic occupancy model, allowing assessment of responses to extreme events as well as the occurrence of multiple extreme conditions within the same time period (“stacked” extremes). The analysis evaluates whether higher weather variability is associated with greater variability in occupancy patterns and whether stacked extreme conditions are associated with stronger deviations in occupancy.

This approach links climatic variability and extreme weather structure with observed species occupancy dynamics using a consistent modeling framework across simulated and empirical conditions.

Speaker: Aaron Hagen Kauffeldt (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

96 The hidden dimensions of biodiversity loss in the Brazilian Campos Rupestres: lessons from Velloziaceae

The unique environmental conditions of the Brazilian Campos Rupestres (CR), such as shallow nutrient-poor soils, high temperatures, intense solar radiation, water scarcity, and natural fire regimes, have likely driven the evolution of distinctive functional strategies, e.g., desiccation and fire tolerance in Velloziaceae species. Although the effects of climate change on mountain biodiversity remain debated, the CR already faces serious threats from ecotourism, mining, increased fire frequency, and exotic species. In this context, integrative studies combining multiple dimensions of biodiversity are essential to understand the mechanisms behind diversity maintenance and informing conservation strategies. The plant family Velloziaceae, with about 300 species concentrated mainly in the CR, provides an excellent model for investigating these processes due to its high levels of microendemism and remarkable functional diversity. Here, we compiled spatial, morpho-functional, and phylogenetic data, evaluated species sampling trends, and assessed the effects of simulated species extinctions on patterns of taxonomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity within Velloziaceae. Our analysis of potential sampling biases revealed a correlation between species occurrences and proximity to roads. Rarefaction curves indicate a continuing potential for species discovery, especially within the Cerrado domain. Furthermore, species richness and endemism remained positively associated with sampling effort even after controlling for the effects of temperature and precipitation, suggesting that current knowledge of the family's distribution remains influenced by collection intensity. Finally, simulated extinctions suggest significant reductions in functional and phylogenetic diversity across eastern Brazilian mountain communities. Our findings show the importance of field sampling and taxonomic research for accurately documenting one of the most emblematic lineages of the CR flora. Furthermore, our findings highlight the vulnerability of CR ecosystems and the importance of integrative approaches combining species distributions, functional traits, and evolutionary history to guide conservation in threatened montane systems.

Speaker: Andressa Cabral (Universität Leipzig / iDiv)

97 TRY Plant Trait Database Version 7

Plant traits - encompassing morphological, anatomical, biochemical, physiological, or phenological features measurable at the individual level - serve to link species richness with ecosystem functional diversity. Emphasizing traits and trait syndromes is regarded as a promising foundation for adopting a more quantitative and predictive approach in biodiversity, ecology, and global change science. Although the compilation of plant traits has been ongoing for many years, a comprehensive database was previously absent.

In 2007, the IGBP and DIVERSITAS initiative, titled ‘Refining Plant Functional Classifications,’ commissioned the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry to develop a global plant trait database aimed at supporting research in biodiversity, functional biogeography, and vegetation modeling. This initiative was named TRY. With contributions from numerous original datasets and the most extensive integrated datasets available at that time, the TRY Database immediately achieved unprecedented coverage. Since 2015, dataset owners have been permitted to publicly share datasets via TRY, and since 2019, data in the database have been freely accessible by default under a CC-BY license. To date, the database has received approximately 50,000 requests. In conclusion, TRY has established itself as a central hub for plant trait data globally.

The forthcoming version of the TRY database, version 7.0, is anticipated to be released in the summer of 2026. It will be constructed upon 907 datasets and will encompass approximately 23.4 million trait records spanning 3,317 traits. This represents an approximate 50% increase in trait records compared to the current TRY version 6. For the first time, taxonomy is aligned with the GBIF taxonomy.

Speaker: Jens Kattge (MPI-BGC)

98 Earthworm density regulates depth-dependent carbon dynamics in degraded alpine peat soils

Peatlands store a disproportionately large share of global soil carbon, yet their stability is increasingly threatened by drying-induced degradation. Such degradation may create conditions that facilitate colonization of earthworms, although they are typically absent from waterlogged peat soils. However, how earthworm colonization alters peatland carbon dynamics remains poorly understood. Here, we used a 280-day mesocosm experiment with intact peat soil columns to investigate how earthworms and their densities influence carbon pools, nitrogen availability, and microbial processes across soil depths (surface: 0-10 cm; subsurface: 10-20 cm). Our results showed that earthworm altered soil carbon dynamics in a depth-dependent manner. Total carbon increased in surface soils under low earthworm density, but remained relatively stable in subsurface soils. In contrast, dissolved organic carbon (DOC) declined significantly by 16–37% across both soil depths, with stronger reductions at higher earthworm density. Phenolic compounds showed limited or no consistent responses to earthworm addition. Earthworm altered nitrogen dynamics by affecting both total and dissolved nitrogen pools. Total nitrogen increased in surface soils under low earthworm density, consistent with the pattern observed for total carbon, whereas dissolved nitrogen increased substantially across treatments, indicating enhanced nitrogen availability. Besides, earthworm suppressed β-1,4-glucosidase activity by 20% and 56% in surface soils under low and high densities, respectively, while enhancing both β-1,4-glucosidase and β-1,4-cellobiohydrolase activities in subsurface soils. Structural equation modelling further revealed distinct regulatory pathways across depths: surface DOC declined mainly through direct earthworm effects, whereas subsurface DOC was controlled indirectly through a moisture-mediated β-1,4-cellobiohydrolase pathway. Together, these results demonstrate that earthworms regulate carbon processing in alpine peat soils in a depth-dependent manner, with density-dependent effects on carbon turnover and retention. Our findings highlight the importance of soil fauna in regulating peatland carbon dynamics and call for greater consideration of faunal-driven processes under peatland degradation.

Speaker: Hui Zhang (Chengdu Institute of Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig – iDiv)

99 Cell wall traits shape leaf drought tolerance in subtropical dry and wet forests

Cellular and leaf structural traits influence the regulation of leaf water balance, which in turn impacts leaf gas exchange, plant productivity and drought tolerance. Yet, the role of cell wall composition, and especially that of components that render cell walls flexible—such as pectin—in leaf water relations remains elusive. Here, we investigate the linkages among 26 traits, including cell wall composition, anatomy, and drought tolerance (described by pressure-volume curves) across 69 woody species from subtropical dry and wet forests. We find that the lower wilting point of species of dry forests relative to wet forests is associated with contrasting anatomy and wall composition. Pressure-volume traits correlate more strongly with wall composition, and particularly pectin concentration, in dry forests, and with anatomy in wet forests. Thus, pectin-enriched cell walls contribute to the ecological specialization of woody plants in dry versus wet forests. Our findings indicate that leaf hydraulic designs diverge according to two strategies: dry forest species vary in elastic and osmotic function via contrasting pectin concentration (“flexible cell wall” strategy), whereas wet forest species do so via contrasting palisade tissue investment (“stable leaf tissue” strategy). Overall, diversity in cell wall properties across species are strongly linked with drought tolerance.

Speaker: Dr Mengcheng Duan (Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

100 From disturbance responses to temporal dynamics: Resilience metrics in Earth observation (EO) supported ecology

The increasing availability of Earth observation (EO) and ecosystem flux time series has led to rapid growth in the use of “resilience metrics” to characterize ecosystem dynamics under global change. Metrics such as resistance, recovery, variability, autocorrelation, and memory are increasingly applied across ecosystems and spatial scales, often with the aim of identifying vulnerable systems or early warning signals of change. Often, the use of such metrics is in the context of anticipating so-called “tipping points”. However, these metrics are frequently interpreted interchangeably despite representing different ecological concepts, statistical concepts, and temporal properties of the observations itself.

In this talk, we examine how resilience-related metrics derived from EOs and flux data are conceptualized and applied across the literature. We distinguish between metrics that explicitly describe ecosystem responses to disturbances (e.g. resistance and recovery following drought or heat extremes) and metrics that characterize intrinsic temporal dynamics without reference to specific events (e.g. variability, autocorrelation, or “memory”). We argue that these distinct interpretations are often conflated, complicating ecological interpretation and comparisons across studies. We also consider the data properties of (partially incomplete) observations, short time series (on a decadal scale), and in case of EOs only multiday sampling.

We aim to outline how disturbance regimes and ecosystem functional structure may jointly shape observed temporal dynamics. In particular, we explore the potential role of plant traits and functional diversity in mediating resistance, recovery, and temporal persistence in ecosystem signals. Rather than proposing a single definition of resilience, this talk aims to clarify the conceptual relationships among commonly used metrics and highlight key challenges in linking EO-derived indicators to ecological mechanisms.

Speaker: Sophie Wolf (Leipzig University)

101 Vegetation Structure and Cloud-Surface Coupling Over Southern Germany

Landscape diversity can influence cloud development by modifying evapotranspiration, surface roughness, turbulent mixing and boundary-layer growth. However, the strength of this land-surface influence depends on whether clouds are thermodynamically connected to the surface. This ongoing study investigates how landscape and land-cover structure relate to coupled and decoupled cloud states over Southern Germany. We combine MODIS Aqua cloud observations, ERA5 surface meteorology, CORINE land-cover data, GEDI vegetation structure and elevation information for May 2019-2022. Cloud-surface coupling is diagnosed at the MODIS overpass scale. For each valid liquid-cloud pixel, MODIS cloud top pressure, cloud top temperature and liquid water path are used to estimate cloud base through an adiabatic liquid-water-path integration. From cloud base, an air parcel is extrapolated dry-adiabatically to ERA5 surface pressure. The resulting adiabatic surface temperature is compared with ERA5 2 m temperature; positive differences indicate coupled clouds, while negative differences indicate decoupled clouds. Preliminary results show that liquid clouds over Southern Germany are predominantly decoupled in May, although coupled and decoupled states occur as spatially coherent patches within individual cloud scenes. Monthly coupled fractions increase from 18.7% in 2019 to 26.8% in 2022, suggesting interannual variability in cloud-surface thermodynamic connection. The next phase will use statistical and machine-learning models to quantify relationships between vegetation structure, land-cover type, elevation and cloud coupling state. We will test whether forest cover, canopy height, canopy heterogeneity and land-cover classes are associated with differences in coupled fraction, decoupled fraction, cloud-top temperature and liquid water path. By linking cloud thermodynamic state with ecosystem structure, this work contributes to a scale-explicit understanding of how vegetation may shape land-atmosphere functioning.

Speaker: Janet Mumo Mutuku (Leipzig University)

102 R Environment for Environmental Sciences: Four Packages Worth Knowing

Reproducibility in ecological research is a known problem with a less-known solution: not one tool, but a small, composable set of them. This poster introduces four R packages that, used together,
address most of the practical pain points researchers encounter between raw data and published results.

Each panel maps to one package. renv handles the environment itself — separate package libraries per project, version numbers recorded, no more "it works on my machine." Crucially, it also means
that a project archived on Zenodo today will still run in five years, after dozens of package updates have broken everything else. pins solves a quieter but equally frustrating problem: shared
datasets that live in too many places, get out of sync, and lack a single source of truth.

testthat is the least obvious inclusion for ecologists, but arguably the most valuable. It lets you write down, in code, what you expect your data to look like — column names, value ranges, absence
of duplicates — and check those expectations automatically at every step of a pipeline. Combined with checkmate for argument validation and testdat for dataframe-specific checks, it turns
assumptions that usually live in a researcher's head into something the computer can verify. Silent data corruption, wrong joins, and unexpected NAs get caught early rather than at submission.
Finally, rmarkdown (and its successor quarto) ties everything together into documents where code, results, and prose coexist and can be re-run at any point.

The central section of the poster walks through a short workflow combining all four: loading a shared species occurrence dataset via pins, running it through a validated cleaning pipeline with
testthat checks at each step, within a renv-locked environment, and producing a reproducible report with rmarkdown.

The goal is practical. Most researchers already use one of these tools. The poster is meant to be the nudge that gets them to use the other three.

Speaker: Alban Sagouis

103 Evaluating a protected area portfolio against global biodiversity and climate goals

Protected areas are one of the most important tools to preserve species and biodiversity. With limited conservation funding, expectations and demands on protected area networks are manyfold, e.g. protecting species, ensuring ecosystem functioning, or mitigating climate change. This necessitates a prioritization of conservation effort and continuous evaluation of protected area portfolios against individual targets and goals. Here, we use the case study of a large government-funded development bank to develop an approach that evaluates areas against the global biodiversity and climate goals set by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. We identify key indicators for assessing areas, and apply these to evaluation examples at three spatial levels, i.e. the biogeographical realm, the biome, and the country levels. At each spatial level, our approach evaluates how i) a portfolio of protected areas such as financed by development banks or conservation agencies and ii) an individual selected protected area contributes to these targets, by contrasting the indicators for the selected portfolio or area with indicators for a random selection of protected areas in the same realm, biome, or country. Our case study results highlight challenges in meeting diverse conservation objectives with limited numbers of protected areas, providing a basis for informed decision-making and contributing to more effective quality control in area-based conservation.

Speaker: Alke Voskamp (FSU)

104 The diversity of taxon-specific biochemical features of the marine red algae representing the orders Ceramiales and Gigartinales

The orders Ceramiales and Gigartinales are among the largest and most diverse taxonomic groups of red algae. Their representatives dominate the flora of Arctic and tempered seas, providing habitat and food for numerous marine species. Furthermore, many of these algae serve as sources of valuable marine-derived compounds: agar, carrageenans, biologically active phenolic substances etc. A detailed study of the biochemical composition of these organisms (“biochemical fingerprinting”) is of considerable interest both from the perspective of revealing fundamental patterns of seaweed metabolism evolved within the orders and for their valorisation. Our study focuses on the comparison of the biochemical characteristics of ceramialean and gigartinalean algae.
Nine ceramialean (Ceramium virgatum, Ptilota gunneri, Phycodrys rubens, Polysiphonia stricta, Savoiea arctica, Vertebrata fucoides, Odonthalia dentata, Rhodomela confervoides, and R. lycopodioides) and six gigartinalean (Polyides rotunda, Coccotylus brodiei, Euthora cristata, Furcellaria lumbricalis, Cystoclonium purpureum, and Fimbrifolium dichotomum) algae were collected in the White Sea. The following parameters were considered: content of photosynthetic pigments (spectrophotometry), total protein (Lowry assay), carbohydrates (anthrone method), and profiles of low molecular weight metabolites (GC-MS analysis).
Even when inhabiting similar environments, the representatives of the two orders exhibited numerous biochemical peculiarities. Compared to gigartinalean algae, Ceramiales contain twice as much chlorophyll and phycoerythrin and relatively high amounts of protein (up to 32% DW) and free amino acids. Furthermore, ceramialean algae tend to accumulate organic acids from the TCA cycle, but also various halogenated phenolic compounds. The latter especially relates to the representatives of the family Rhodomelaceae, featuring a broad spectrum of bromophenols. Gigartinalean algae were distinguished by relatively high amounts of carbohydrates, including specific glycosides and polyols, and sterols. Remarkably, the only phenolic-rich gigartinalean alga (F. lumbricalis) showed a unique molecular profile of these metabolites with predominance of phenolic acids. This metabolic diversity is discussed with respect to the physiological appearance within the specific habitats of the different species.

Speaker: Claudia Wiesner (Leipzig University, iDiv)

105 Herbivore Assemblages Regulate Soil Multifunctionality through Microbial Diversity and Keystone Taxa in an Alpine Grassland

Grazing is a dominant land use in alpine grasslands, yet it remains unclear whether different livestock assemblages can enhance soil multifunctionality through shifts in soil microbial diversity and network organization. We tested this question in a long-term, moderate-intensity grazing experiment on the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau, comparing yak-only grazing, Tibetan sheep-only grazing, three yak–sheep mixed-grazing ratios (1:2, 1:4 and 1:6) and grazing exclusion. We quantified soil multifunctionality using standardized indicators of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus availability, soil moisture, pH and bulk density, and characterized bacterial and fungal communities using Illumina MiSeq sequencing, co-occurrence networks and random forest models. Grazing effects were strongly assemblage-dependent. Yak-only grazing reduced soil multifunctionality relative to the fenced control, whereas all other grazing treatments increased it, with the highest values under Tibetan sheep grazing and yak–sheep mixed grazing at 1:6. Bacterial and fungal richness, but not Shannon diversity, was positively associated with soil multifunctionality. Mixed grazing at 1:4 and 1:6 also shifted microbial community composition, reducing oligotrophic Acidobacteria and increasing copiotrophic or saprotrophic fungal groups, including Mortierellomycota and Mucoromycota. Random forest analysis identified total nitrogen, available nitrogen, available phosphorus, bulk density and soil moisture as the main predictors of soil multifunctionality; bacterial communities were chiefly associated with bulk density, available phosphorus, available nitrogen and moisture, whereas fungal communities were linked to total organic carbon, available nitrogen, bulk density and available phosphorus. Network analysis further showed contrasting microbial mechanisms: bacterial module hubs were negatively related to soil multifunctionality, while fungal keystone taxa were consistently positive predictors. These findings demonstrate that livestock assemblage composition, not grazing presence alone, regulates belowground multifunctionality in alpine grasslands. Moderate yak–sheep mixed grazing, particularly at 1:6, may provide a practical management option for sustaining soil functions while maintaining productive use of fragile alpine rangelands.

Speaker: Ms Jinyu Zhao (School of Ethnology and Sociology, Minzu University of China)

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106 Phenological responses to extremes across growth forms, phenological strategies and phenological niche

In temperate zones, warmer springs shift leaf-out and flowering to earlier dates. Likewise, phenology shifts affect water and carbon cycles, influencing the climate system. Despite progress in understanding phenology-climate dynamics, gaps remain on how weather extremes impact phenology, especially using long-term and ground-based data, which offer detailed information about species that satellite images cannot capture. Our goal is to assess how extreme spring warmth and drought affect plant phenology, focusing on the roles of growth form, phenological niche, and strategy.
In this study, we compiled ground-based observations of first leaf-out (FLO) and first flowering day (FFD) from four monitoring networks: NatureWatch (Canada), PEP725 (Europe), NPN (USA), and Chronicle of Nature Calendar (Russia). We evaluated the relationship between phenology and extremes using Generalized additive models. We estimated temperature, precipitation, and phenology anomalies as annual deviation from long-term mean spring climate and date of FLO and FFD. We modeled phenology anomalies as a function of climate anomalies. Growth forms (herbs, shrubs, and trees); phenology strategies (Proteranthous: flowers appear before the leaves. Hysteranthous: leaves appear before the flowers); and phenological niche were added as covariates.
Our results show a differing pattern among the growth forms and phenology strategies. Warmer-than-average temperatures do not advance the FLO and FFD events in trees, whereas for herbs and shrubs, the events occur earlier. In trees, this relationship is consistent in both phenology strategies; however, in shrubs, temperature anomalies affect more to proteranthous than hysteranthous species. For all growth forms, anomalies in precipitation delay the FLO and FFD, and the effect is stronger in interaction with temperature anomalies. Furthermore, spring-flowering species respond more strongly to temperature and precipitation anomalies than summer-flowering species.

Speaker: Andrea Silva-Cala (Plant Biodiversity group. FSU Jena)

107 A tree identification game for urban species awareness

Which tree species define Leipzig's urban landscape, and do citizens know them? Biodiversity provides many services, including contributions to human well-being: green areas consistently improve mood and quality of life. Urban trees have long life histories and pass through many human generations, becoming embedded in a place's cultural and historical memory. Yet many urban residents cannot identify the trees around them, especially those who grew up in a different biome and moved to a new area. Additionally, trees that matter to people are increasingly threatened: ongoing climate change, including droughts and shifts in seasonality, alongside the spread of invasive species, is altering the conditions urban trees depend on. As global change intensifies, species unable to adapt to local environmental shifts will be filtered out. Closing the gap between public familiarity and ecological urgency requires engagement at the citizen level. We argue that identification itself is a first step toward awareness, and that tree identification can connect citizens to biodiversity and help people perceive environmental change over time through shifts in tree distribution across the city.
To playfully engage citizens with the biodiversity around them, we developed a tree identification game. We selected the 20 most representative tree species of the Leipzig urban area as its foundation. Players match species cards across four languages (German, English, Latin, and Portuguese/French) and across identification features (bark, leaf, flower, fruit). The game is designed as both a leisure activity and a first layer of biodiversity literacy, grounding players in the species that shape their city and face an uncertain future.
During the iDiv conference, we will present the game and invite participants to play a test round as an integrative activity.

Speaker: Daniela Hoss (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research - iDiv)

108 Tree species richness and mycorrhizal type drive depth-dependent patterns in soil properties and microbiota r/K life-history strategies

Tree diversity and mycorrhizal types are key drivers of belowground ecosystem processes, yet their interactive effects on microbial and soil faunal life-history strategies across soil depths remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigated how tree species richness and mycorrhizal types influence the r/K life-history strategies of soil bacteria, fungi, and nematodes, and how these soil biodiversity responses are linked to soil physicochemical properties across a deep soil profile. The study was conducted in the MyDiv experimental platform, a nine-year field biodiversity experiment with manipulated tree species richness (1, 2, and 4 species) and mycorrhizal association types (arbuscular mycorrhizae [AM], ectomycorrhizae [EM], and mixed AM+EM communities). Soil samples were collected across eight depth intervals (0–5, 5–10, 10–20, 20–30, 30–40, 40–50, 50–60, and 60–100 cm). We quantified soil chemical and physical properties including total carbon (TC), total organic carbon (TOC), inorganic carbon (TIC), labile organic carbon (LOC), recalcitrant organic carbon (ROC), total nitrogen (TN), soil pH, and soil moisture, alongside microbial and nematode community composition and r/K life-history strategies. Our results demonstrate several significant interaction effects of mycorrhizal type, tree species richness (TSR), and soil depth on microbial and nematode r/K strategies. Across the soil profile, bacterial and nematode r/K ratios increased with soil depth, whereas fungal r/K strategies showed an opposite trend, resulting in a pronounced depth-dependent divergence in fungal r/K patterns. In particular, AM-associated systems exhibited significantly higher r/K values compared to AM+EM and EM systems. Distinct vertical stratification patterns were observed between soil properties and ecological strategies. The topsoil layer (0–30 cm) was primarily associated with higher concentrations of TOC, LOC, TN, soil moisture, and fungal r/K strategies, whereas deeper soil layers (40–100 cm) were mainly characterized by higher TIC and soil pH, and were more strongly associated with bacterial and nematode r/K strategies. Overall, our findings demonstrate that mycorrhizal type and soil depth jointly structure belowground life-history strategies, with these effects being mechanistically driven by depth-dependent shifts in soil carbon fractions and nutrient availability.

Speaker: Wenting Wang (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig - iDiv)

Afternoon Sessions: Complexity

Conveners: Michael Gerth (German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig & Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), Robert Rauschkolb (Friedrich Schiller University, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP) Jena)

109 Urbanization reorganizes plant–pollinator networks across space, time and socio-ecological gradients

Urbanization reshapes biodiversity, yet how it interacts with spatiotemporal gradients to reorganize species interactions – and how these interactions respond to multiple socio-ecological drivers – remains poorly understood. Here we analyzed plant–pollinator interaction networks across 22 urban green spaces sampled year-round along an urbanization gradient in an underrepresented Asian megacity. Seasonality emerged as the dominant driver of interaction turnover, while urbanization amplified temporal interaction β-diversity, primarily through increased seasonal turnover of plant species. This pattern was largely driven by non-native plants, which also disproportionately occupied key structural positions as network and module hubs. Among all drivers, urbanization intensity and local management exerted the strongest indirect effects on network structure by altering plant and pollinator diversity, with downstream consequences for interaction specialization and network robustness. A legacy effect on biodiversity was detected, whereas no luxury effect was evident, highlighting context dependence in links between urban form, socioeconomic context, and biodiversity. Together, our findings underscore the importance of multi-season sampling for understanding urban pollination networks and demonstrate that green space management can play a central role in conserving both biodiversity and the structure of ecological interactions in cities.

Speaker: Huan Liang (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv))

110 Land-use transition pathways drive scale-dependent changes in bird biodiversity across China

Land-use change has transformed nearly three-quarters of terrestrial ecosystems and remains a major driver of biodiversity change. In China, recent policies aimed at balancing food security and ecological conservation have substantially reshaped land-use patterns, yet their consequences for bird biodiversity remain insufficiently quantified. We applied the countryside species-area relationship model, combined with land-use change data and bird species records, to assess bird biodiversity loss under current land-use patterns and identify key transition pathways responsible for biodiversity change. We found a clear scale-dependent decoupling between local and regional biodiversity responses. Local α-diversity increased slightly for forest, open-terrestrial, and wetland birds, with species richness increasing by 0.61%, 0.63%, and 0.81%, respectively. However, mean γ-diversity losses remained substantial, reaching 16.72%, 16.36%, and 15.92% for the three groups. These contrasting patterns indicate that local richness gains do not necessarily translate into regional biodiversity maintenance. In Northeast China, forest and wetland birds showed opposing spatial responses, suggesting functional replacement and community reassembly rather than uniform biodiversity recovery. Pathway-based responsibility analysis further revealed that biodiversity loss was highly concentrated in a limited number of land-use transitions. Approximately 35% of transition pathways contributed about 85% of forest bird loss, with high-risk pathways mainly involving forest conversion to wetland, grassland, and annual cropland. For open-terrestrial birds, annual cropland to urban land and wetland were dominant high-responsibility pathways. Spatial responsibility zoning identified North China as a major high-loss and high-responsibility region for forest and open-terrestrial birds, whereas parts of Southwest China represented potential risk areas. Wetland bird loss was mainly associated with low-responsibility pathways in Northwest and Northeast China. Overall, our results show that land-use change not only drives bird biodiversity loss but also reshapes functional community composition, highlighting the need for pathway-specific and functional-group-sensitive conservation strategies.

Speaker: Sun Zhang

111 Genetic responses to landscape history of a semi-natural grassland plant’s populations across Europe

Semi-natural grasslands are one of the most species-rich ecosystems of Europe but have undergone particularly strong habitat changes due to land use intensification and abandonment. Over the past decades, the area of semi-natural grasslands in Europe has been drastically reduced. With declining area, the remaining populations in these habitats became smaller, more isolated, and increasingly disconnected, resulting in strongly reduced or even inhibited gene flow. The consequence is genetic impoverishment leading to reduced resistance to environmental changes and diseases.
Our study species, Primula veris L. (cowslip), is a herbaceous plant that typically grows in nutrient-poor semi-natural grasslands. Our study regions span five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, Sweden, and Estonia) covering a broad part of the species’ distribution range. We performed next-generation sequencing on 150 populations and analyzed the relationship between genetic diversity and landscape configuration at three points in time over the past 80 years.
Although contemporary landscape composition affects genetic diversity of the study populations, historical landscape characteristics continue to shape present-day population genetics. This time lag in genetic response provides an opportunity to implement conservation measures preserving former genetic diversity, even in landscapes that have already undergone fragmentation and other habitat changes.

Speaker: Marie Ende (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

112 Temporal changes in forest habitat types across European temperate forests

Long-term community dynamics are typically characterized by changes in species composition and diversity, whereas shifts among entire communities and habitat types remain underexplored. The objective of this study is to quantify temporal changes in forest habitat types across European temperate forests and to determine how these changes are associated with shifts in typical species, as well as with macroclimatic trends and local environmental conditions. Here, we use the forestREplot database, which includes approximately 7,000 (quasi-)permanent plots spanning 108 regions across European temperate forests and compiles forest vegetation resurveys dating back to the 1920s. EUNIS habitat types were assigned to both baseline and resurvey plots using the expert-based EUNIS-ESy classification system. We address the following research questions: (1) Are there significant gains or losses in habitat types across temperate forest regions, and which habitat types change the most? (2) Which typical species are associated with these changes? (3) What are the main drivers of temporal habitat change, including macroclimate, nitrogen deposition, canopy cover, and soil conditions?

Speaker: Liping Wei (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

113 Local population dynamics shape biodiversity patterns in fragmented landscapes

Although the negative effects of habitat loss on biodiversity are arguably well understood, there is active debate regarding the isolated effects of fragmentation per-se. While the empirical literature suggests a variety of effects of fragmentation on biodiversity, there are few theoretical frameworks for understanding when divergent responses should be expected. Here we show how assumptions regarding the stability of local population dynamics influence emergent biodiversity patterns in landscapes across gradients of habitat loss and fragmentation. We take a theoretical approach and simulate spatially explicit metacommunities with a model that allows for variable population dynamics which can be either locally-stable (i.e., persistent) or locally-unstable (i.e., transiently bound for extinction). Our results show that metacommunities with locally-stable population dynamics all exhibit similar responses to habitat loss and fragmentation regardless of the details of their population dynamics (e.g., fixed point, periodic oscillations, or aperiodic oscillations). Furthermore, we find that these locally-stable metacommunities can exhibit a range of responses to habitat loss ranging from negative to hump-shaped, depending strongly on the degree of fragmentation. This is in contrast to locally-unstable metacommunities which exhibit consistently negative responses to habitat loss regardless of the degree of fragmentation. Isolating this effect of fragmentation, we show that when habitat loss is high our model predicts contrasting effects on biodiversity, where locally-stable metacommunities respond positively and locally-unstable metacommunities respond negatively. This work provides a mechanistic exploration of how local population dynamics can influence large-scale biodiversity patterns in fragmented landscapes and provides predictions as to when and why contrasting responses should be expected.

Speaker: Zachary Hajian-Forooshani (iDiv)

114 Taxonomic Variation in Freshwater Insect Responses to Land Use Change

In freshwater biomonitoring, a common assumption is that members of the ordersEphemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera(collectively known as (EPT) are generally more sensitive to environmental degradation than other insect orders (non-EPT), and this assumption underlies the widespread use macroinvertebrate indices that specifically focus on these taxa. However, while EPT are often good indicators of land-use change in the watershed, there are many counter-examples. Here, we endeavored to evaluate the association between proportions of EPT in macroinvertebrate samples and land-use in the surrounding watershed as a robust indicator of land use change specifically remains limited. We used a database containing freshwater insect abundances from 83 studies that compare sites with more versus less intense land use and examined how EPT and non-EPT taxa respond.
We found that land use intensification suppressed the EPT abundance ratio (EPT abundance relative to total insect abundance) more strongly than the EPT richness ratio (EPT richness relative to total insect richness), with urban habitats imposing the strongest and most consistent effects. With EPT, family-level responses were heterogeneous; some families strongly responded to land use while others did not, challenging the assumption of using EPT as a coherent indicator. Beta diversity analyses showed that compositional change among the EPT emerged through loss of some taxa (but not gains in others), indicating that nestedness rather than taxon replacement. For non-EPT taxa, we found roughly equal contributions from both nestedness and turnover (some taxa are lost and others gained).
These findings show evidence of both the mechanisms and the limits of EPT as a bioindicator, and illustrate the need for more nuanced interpretations of community wide compositional shifts by dissecting the reasons for observed changes.

Speaker: Minghua Shen

Afternoon Sessions: Functions

Conveners: Pia Loeffke (iDiv, EIE), Qing-Fang Bi (Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry)

115 The effects of temperature gradient on flower and fruit traits: a meta analysis

Angiosperm reproduction is driven by two largely animal-dependent consecutive processes: pollination and seed dispersal. Factors governing these interactions are critical for plant regeneration, habitat structure, animal communities, population genetics, and hence ecosystem stability. A major driver of plant-animal interactions is trait matching: morphological, chemical, and mechanical traits of flowers, fruits, and animals such as size or chemical composition that promote pairwise interactions and prohibit others. Critically, floral and fruit traits are influenced by a variety of factors susceptible to global change such as temperature or precipitation patterns. Yet most studies on the potential effects of global change on flower and fruit traits are localized and species-specific. Thus, any systematic effects of climate change on flower and fruit traits remain unknown. We report a meta-analysis on the effects of temperature on flower and fruit traits using the elevation-for-temperature approach. Using data from 151 species in 81 studies covering ranges between 0 and 5500 m above sea level, we show that in flowers, floral shape and longevity was highly susceptible to elevational changes, whereas in fruits crop size and micronutrient content are affected. These results indicate that climate change may drive changes in flower and fruit traits with downstream consequences for animal communities, plant regeneration patterns, and ecosystem functioning.

Speaker: Omer Nevo (iDiv)

116 Phylogenomic and transcriptomic insights into the repeated evolution of fruit types in angiosperms

Fruits are key innovations in angiosperms, with dry and fleshy types reflecting distinct reproductive and ecological strategies. Dry fruits mainly rely on abiotic dispersal or mechanical release, whereas fleshy fruits attract frugivores through nutritional rewards and visual signals. Although dry and fleshy fruits evolved repeatedly across angiosperms, the molecular changes underlying the recurrent evolution at genomic or transcriptomic levels remain unresolved. Here, we combined phylogenomic analyses across 187 angiosperm species with comparative transcriptomic analyses from 20 species to explore their developmental and evolutionary basis. Dry fruit species exhibited significantly higher gene copy numbers than fleshy fruit species, suggesting distinct patterns of genome evolution associated with fruit type differentiation. Using phylogenetic generalized linear models (PGLMs), we identified repeated expansions of gene families related to fruit dehiscence and programmed cell death in dry fruits, whereas fleshy fruits showed repeated expansions in gene families associated with fruit ripening, ethylene signaling and sugar metabolism. Cross-species RNA-seq further revealed the transcriptional divergence during fruit development. Although both fruit types shared conserved developmental programs, genes upregulated in fleshy fruits were enriched in ripening-related processes, including aroma and secondary metabolisms, which may contribute to dispersal-related traits in fleshy fruits. In contrast, dry fruits showed enrichment in secondary cell wall biogenesis and stress response processes, consistent with their mechanical dispersal strategies. Most fruit-associated genes acted during ripening, marking the transition from photosynthetic and defended tissues to mature reproductive organs. Together, these findings suggest that repeated fruit type evolution is associated with both gene copy number changes and shifts in developmental gene expression patterns, providing insights into the molecular basis of fruit diversification across angiosperms.

Speaker: Ding-Jie Wang

117 The lifecycle strategies of soil prokaryotes and viruses contribute to higher carbon and nitrogen sequestration in grassland compared to cropland soils.

The conversion of croplands to grasslands leads to increased segregation of soil microbes and organic matter due to the absence of tillage. It also results in a higher diversity of specialized rhizodeposits that serve as nutrient sources. Organisms are often classified based on their lifecycle strategies into K-strategists and r-strategists, or as generalists and specialists, depending on their growth patterns or the ability to utilize various nutrients and tolerate environmental conditions. Since these traits influence their functional potential, we hypothesized that grasslands promote a greater abundance of K-strategists and niche-specialist prokaryotes and viruses, thereby enhancing the functional diversity of genes involved in carbon and nitrogen cycling and increasing the accumulation of these elements compared to croplands. To test this, we re-analyzed publicly available metagenomic data from a long-term experiment at the Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF) in Central Germany, covering different years. The microbial communities from grasslands were compared with those from conventional and organic cropland soils. Results showed that grassland soils accumulated more carbon and nitrogen, with microbial communities demonstrating greater functional diversity. Grassland microbiota also exhibited a higher abundance of K-strategist prokaryotes and niche-specialist prokaryotes/viruses when compared to cropland soils. The lifecycle strategies of soil prokaryotes and viruses, shaped by land management, seem to contribute to carbon and nitrogen sequestration via both direct and indirect mechanisms. To further investigate the role of viruses, we examined auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs) linked to nitrogen and carbon cycling, which were significantly more abundant in grassland soils. These genes displayed similar abundance patterns as the overall metagenomes and correlated positively with the prevalence of enriched viruses. Overall, the selection of specialist over generalist prokaryotes and viruses in grasslands appears to influence the functional diversity of soil microbiomes, which plays a vital role in regulating biogeochemical processes and supporting nutrient cycling.

Speaker: Dr Ioannis Kampouris (Applied Microbial Ecology, iDiv)

118 The role of protected areas in mitigation plant biodiversity loss in Germany

Protected areas are the most important tool for combating the global biodiversity crisis, yet their effectiveness especially for vascular plants remains poorly quantified with most studies relying on qualitative rather than time-series approaches. Germany maintains one of the EU’s most extensive protected area networks, but a notable proportion predates systematic conservation planning and awareness of global change, raising the question whether fixed protected area boundaries adequately respond to dynamic environmental change. Unlike mobile taxa, endangered plants experience range loss primarily through local extinction rather than colonization, making time-series data particularly informative for assessing whether protected areas effectively retain threatened species.
Here, we leverage two complementary open-access datasets to investigate PA effectiveness for nationally threatened plant species at different spatial scales. At the national scale, we assess how protected area coverage relates to species range persistence for 861 red-listed species over nearly 60 years, differentiating between PA categories. We complement this with a plot-level resurvey dataset examining colonization rates, extinction rates, and mean annual cover changes of red-listed species inside versus outside protected areas.
Our results reveal differential effectiveness across PA categories. At the national scale, strict protection (IUCN I-III and biosphere reserve cores) and Natura 2000 sites were associated with greater range persistence, while IUCN IV and V showed no significant effects. At the plot level, strict protected areas showed significantly higher colonization rates, whereas IUCN IV and Natura 2000 sites exhibited elevated extinction rates. Mean annual cover changes did not differ significantly between protected and unprotected sites. These findings demonstrate that PA category strongly influences conservation outcomes, with strict protection providing clear benefits for species persistence, while other designations may require complementary management strategies to maximize effectiveness

Speaker: Marie Englert (Universität Leipzig)

119 The global green wave trajectory: concept and observed north-east drift

Viewed from space, terrestrial vegetation exhibits a seasonal "green wave" driven by solar forcing and modulated by climate variability, ecosystem properties, and land use. This macrophenological dynamic underpins key local biological processes and global biogeochemical cycles. Here, we introduce a trajectory-based framework that quantifies global vegetation seasonality by tracking the spatio-temporal center of mass of terrestrial greenness from satellite observations and Earth system models. The resulting three-dimensional trajectory acts as a compass of macrophenological shifts, integrating changes in ecosystem functioning across space and time. We define viridistice as the moment of maximal hemispheric greenness and equiviridis as the moment of maximal transition speed of greenness between hemispheres. Our analysis reveals a consistent northward displacement of the green wave trajectory, accompanied by a systematic eastward drift. These changes reflect the combined influence of climate change, CO₂ fertilization, afforestation, and land-use change, and are projected to intensify in CMIP6 simulations, indicating a substantial reorganization of terrestrial biosphere dynamics.

For more information see: http://greenwave.earth/

Speaker: Miguel Mahecha (Leipzig University)

120 Crowd-sensed plants as living sensors of ecosystem state and functioning

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.

Speaker: Susanne Tautenhahn (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena)

Afternoon Sessions: Transdisciplinary

Conveners: A. Cristina de la Vega-Leinert (BIOP - iDiv - UFZ), Gavin Stark (iDiv/MLU)

121 Potential for participatory freshwater restoration by citizen scientists within the FLOW project: motivations, capacities, and needs

Small streams make up a large part of the river network in Germany and perform a variety of important ecosystem services, such as contributing to the preservation of biological diversity, water storage, and climate and flood regulation. Despite their great ecological importance, they have not been adequately covered by official monitoring to date and are mostly in poor ecological condition. This is why, participatory approaches are becoming increasingly important. Citizen science offers the potential to expand data bases, strengthen environmental awareness, and promote social engagement in watercourse protection. While such projects often focus on monitoring and data collection, the systematic implementation of practical, low-threshold renaturation measures by citizen scientists has received less attention to date. In this study, we explore the potential of the Germany-wide citizen science project FLOW for participatory stream restoration. The focus lies on the motivations, capacities, and skills of participants with regard to the planning and implementation of low-threshold restoration measures on small watercourses. In addition, challenges and support needs were identified. The results show a high level of intrinsic motivation among FLOW participants to actively contribute to the protection of water bodies and biodiversity. In addition to the desire to support scientific research, shared experiences, environmental education, and practical learning play a central role. The majority of respondents consider the data collected in the FLOW project to be a suitable basis for deriving restoration measures. At the same time, organizational and administrative barriers as well as limited time and human resources are seen as significant challenges. The implementation of low-threshold measures is generally considered feasible, but requires professional guidance, institutional and political support, improved networking with local actors, and access to knowledge regarding approval processes, responsibilities, and financing options.

Speaker: Louisa-Marie von Plüskow

122 Bridging monitoring gaps in small streams: citizen science as a complement to official freshwater biomonitoring

Despite covering less than 1% of the Earth’s surface, freshwater ecosystems support a disproportionate share of global biodiversity while being among the most threatened habitats worldwide. Small headwater streams dominate river-network length and play a critical role in maintaining freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. However, these systems remain poorly characterized, creating substantial knowledge gaps for biodiversity protection and habitat conservation. In fact, the official European monitoring under the Water Framework Directive (WFD) primarily targets larger watercourses, potentially leaving extensive portions of river networks insufficiently assessed.
Here, we compare macroinvertebrate data collected through the German citizen-science project FLOW (www.flow-projekt.de) with official WFD biomonitoring data to evaluate the potential of citizen science to complement conventional freshwater monitoring. The FLOW dataset includes more than 400 sampling events across approximately 250 streams distributed throughout Germany over six years, while the WFD dataset comprises more than 20,000 official monitoring records.
Using high-resolution hydrographic data, we assess the spatial distribution of both datasets within river networks, with particular emphasis on stream size and headwater representation. In addition, we compare ecological indicators derived from macroinvertebrate communities, including taxonomic richness and biotic indices related to ecological quality and anthropogenic stressors.
Our study aims to determine whether citizen science initiatives can help reduce current monitoring blind spots and improve the representation of ecologically relevant but under-monitored headwater ecosystems. More broadly, this work highlights the potential of integrating citizen science into large-scale freshwater biodiversity assessment and conservation frameworks.

Speaker: Dr Gemma Burgazzi (UFZ/iDiv)

123 Co-producing Urban Biodiversity Knowledge through Citizen Science: Lessons from the VielFalterGarten Project

Urbanisation increasingly threatens biodiversity, while cities simultaneously offer important opportunities for conservation and ecological restoration. Urban green spaces can provide refuges for diverse insect communities, including butterflies, which are highly suitable bioindicators due to their sensitivity to habitat change, environmental stressors, and landscape fragmentation. Their charisma and relative ease of identification also make them particularly well suited for citizen science approaches.
The citizen science project VielFalterGarten in Leipzig, Germany, demonstrates how transdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, citizens, local government, and NGOs can contribute to biodiversity science and urban governance. Through structured 15-minute butterfly counts conducted by volunteers in gardens, parks, and other urban green spaces, the project generates systematic biodiversity observations while simultaneously fostering environmental awareness and citizen engagement in urban nature stewardship.
Using validated observations of more than 6,000 individuals from 41 butterfly species, we analysed how urban structure, habitat characteristics, and management practices shape butterfly abundance and diversity. We found that landscape-scale factors such as lower shares of built-up areas and higher proportions of shrubland positively affected butterfly abundance, while local measures such as flower strips and reduced mowing intensity supported species diversity and specialist species. Species traits, including voltinism, wing size, and diet specialisation, mediated responses to urban management.
The project illustrates how citizen science can support both biodiversity monitoring and evidence-based urban planning, while creating spaces for co-production of knowledge between science, policy, and civil society. Within the EU project Urban Nature Plans+ (UNP+), the approach is currently being expanded across Germany and Europe, highlighting the potential of citizen science to connect biodiversity monitoring, civic engagement, and urban governance.

Speaker: Stefanie Henkel (Biodiversity and People)

124 Drivers of Bird-window Collisions in Continental European Birds

Window collisions are one of the leading anthropogenic drivers of urban bird mortalities globally, and are responsible for the deaths of approximately 100 million birds every year in Germany. Despite the scale and magnitude of this problem, little is known about how the urban landscape shapes the spatial distribution of bird-window collisions, especially in continental Europe. By combining citizen/community science observations of bird-window collisions with species distribution models, we reconstructed the “death niches” of the top five most frequently observed collision victims in Germany. We used our model outputs to identify the urban characteristics most strongly associated with bird-window collisions in order to develop guidelines for efficient implementation of collision mitigation strategies across Germany. Additionally, we projected our models onto the German urban landscape to map out the spatial distribution of collision risk and identify regions of high collision mitigation priority.

Speaker: David Tan (iDiv)

125 LEPMON: Development of hardware tools for the effective monitoring of nocturnal insects

The drastic global decline in insect populations poses a severe threat to ecosystems worldwide. However, a major bottleneck in understanding these trends is the lack of affordable, reliable, and scalable monitoring methods. The LEPMON (Lepidoptera Monitoring) project addresses this gap by developing a framework for the comprehensive monitoring of moths and other nocturnal insects in Germany. LEPMON utilizes Automated Recorders for Nocturnal Insects (ARNIs) to exploit the natural attraction of nocturnal insects to artificial light, photographing them as they settle.

We present two variations of our ARNI: the ARNI Pro, designed with high-end components for long-term professional deployment, and the ARNI CS, a cost-effective alternative utilizing lower-cost optics for wider accessibility. All components of an ARNI must work together to withstand challenging field conditions, including forest canopies to tropical environments, and be controlled by appropriate software. Captured images are subsequently processed using artificial intelligence for automated species identification. Over 100 ARNIs will be deployed across Germany in 2026, enabling high-resolution monitoring of moth populations across time and space. We will present the current state of the LEPMON project, sharing insights and methodology backed by a dataset of over one million images.

Speaker: Gunnar Brehm

126 From NetCDF to Web Maps: Building an Open-Source Web GIS for Biodiversity Data Cubes

Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) provide a standardized framework for monitoring global changes in biodiversity. While the EBV Data Portal enables discovery and cataloging of geospatial EBV datasets, users often require tools to interactively explore the underlying spatiotemporal dimensions for research, monitoring, and evidence-based policy support.

In this presentation we introduce the EBV Visualizer, a lightweight open-source web application for visualizing global biodiversity raster datasets. The visualizer is built entirely with open-source technologies, using vanilla JavaScript, Leaflet.js for map rendering, and Chart.js for interactive time-series visualization.
The backend infrastructure relies on THREDDS Data Server serving NetCDF datasets through ncWMS for efficient tile caching and scalable delivery of multidimensional raster data. This architecture allows users to dynamically explore multi-temporal biodiversity datasets directly in the browser.

The EBV Visualizer complements the EBV Data Portal by enabling interactive exploration of EBV cubes. Users can browse biodiversity variables across spatial, temporal and entity scale, and inspect temporal trends by countries or protected areas etc. This presentation demonstrates how a lightweight open-source stack can provide powerful visualization capabilities for large scientific datasets, lowering technical barriers for accessing biodiversity information and supporting open science in global biodiversity monitoring.

Speaker: Mr Christian Langer (iDiv / Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)

16:00 Coffee Break

Wrap-up and Award Ceremony

Conveners: Aletta Bonn (Helmholtz-Center for Environmental Research - UFZ / German Centre for integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) / Friedrich Schiller University Jena), Markus Bernhardt-Römermann (FSU Jena, Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution)

Bus Shuttle Service