Community ecology of grasslands and agricultural landscapes

The current biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes calls for a thorough mechanistic understanding of the underlying causes. Our working group has a particular focus on plant communities of grasslands. These habitats belong to the most species-rich habitats in Central Europe, harboring many rare and endangered species that are confined to this vegetation type. We are fascinated by the high diversity within small scales and are especially interested to understand how environmental change, like increase of drought events, affects species coexistence and subsequently the species composition in these communities. We seek a mechanistic understanding for testing general theories and enhancing nature conservation concepts. As study system, we used mainly dry and mesophytic grasslands (see GrassYear) as well as depressional wetlands, called kettle holes (see BioHet). In addition to our studies on vegetation, we are investigating ground-dwelling arthropod communities. In our approaches we use trait-based field studies combined with common garden experiments and spatially explicit process-based simulation modelling.