SPP 1374 - Core project 5: Plants

Basic data for this project

Description

Since the beginning of the Biodiversity Exploratory program, the core project Botany examined the diversity of vascular plants, lichens and mosses in both grassland and forests, and as a major ecosystem process the productivity of grasslands. As primary producers, plants are fundamental to understand the effects of land use on ecosystem processes because many land-use effects will be mediated via changes in plant diversity with cascading effects through the entire food web. The main goals of the present project are: - to provide long-term data on the diversity of plants in grassland and forest to understand the effects of land use on plant diversity, - to provide the aboveground productivity of grasslands as a major ecosystem process of plants, - to provide the diversity and aboveground productivity on all agricultural fields as a major comparative ecosystem for plants, - to support the grassland experiments REX and LUX, which manipulate land-use intensity and propagule availability, and the forest gap experiment FOX, which created forest gaps to study the understorey vegetation and forest regeneration. Moreover, the long-term data series of plant diversity and ecosystem processes allow us to estimate the stability of the community, regenerative capacity of communities after disturbances, and temporal trends in community composition as well as the abundance of individual species. Together with the vegetation monitoring, these data provide important baseline information for other projects, as many taxa and ecosystem processes will be directly or indirectly influenced by plant-related changes.