Causes and consequences of biodiversity change

We are a research group based at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Frankfurt, Germany.

Human activities, including land use intensification, nitrogen enrichment and climate change are dramatically altering the Earth’s ecosystems. We are investigating (i) how these drivers influence the assembly and reassembly of ecological communities and (ii) the impact of these changes upon the ecosystem functions and services that people depend upon for their well-being.

This is the largest research area in which we investigate how biodiversity and other landscape features affect the provision of multiple ecosystem services (multifunctionality) at the landscape scale. By combining this work with social science data, we are also establishing how well landscapes deliver services to stakeholders and simulating how biodiversity and land use change would alter ecosystem service supply to multiple stakeholder groups. This may help in identifying land management and governance options.

Much work is conducted within the large-scale and long-term Biodiversity Exploratories project, in which researchers have gathered uniquely comprehensive data on multitrophic biodiversity and ecosystem functioning for 150 grassland and 150 forest sites. Our work has expanded this by detailing the surrounding social system for the first time.

In this research theme we investigate the relationship between global change drivers, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, with an emphasis on data synthesis from multiple experiments and the application of research findings from this field to the management of forests and agroecosystems.

In this fundamental ecology theme, we investigate how plant communities influence soil communities and how these changes feedback to alter aboveground ecosystem properties. We focus on plant traits as a means of making this work mechanistic and general.