Research & Projects
The two main foci of the ecosystem functioning and services lab involve acquiring a better understanding and fostering of extensively managed biodiverse systems and making intensively managed systems more sustainable:
- Extensive land use, land sharing and ecological restoration: testing the potential role of priority effects during assembly.
- Sustainable intensification: Improving the efficiency of nutrient-use in cropping systems by using functional diversity approaches.
Research topics
- Testing priority effects (order of arrival of plant species and functional groups) in assembly as a potential tool for the restoration of biodiverse ecological communities.
- Investigating the importance of weather conditions on the creation and persistence of priority effects during assembly of grassland plant communities. POEM project
- Elucidating the mechanisms leading to priority effects during assembly. POEM project
- The role of nitrogen facilitation in ecosystem functioning and assembly – with particular focus on legume-non legume interactions
- Using positive interactions (both between plants of different functional groups and in cropping systems) for the sustainable transformation of cropping and bioenergy systems. INPLAMINT projekt
- Improving the integration and transfer of knowledge between ecology and policy at the science-policy interface.
- Linking ecological know-how and knowledge based on the above topics with social and governance perspectives to help transform systems towards sustainability (including land sharing and land sparing).
Extensive land use, land sharing and ecological restoration – the potential role of priority effects during assembly
It does matter who is interacting with who and at what time point
Biotic interactions that occur at rather small scales between functionally-distinct plant species can drive how ecosystems function at larger scales, both in terms of positive biodiversity effects as well as affecting assembly of plant communities. Thus the research in the Temperton lab focuses on achieving a better understanding of smaller scale plant-plant interactions with a view to informing ecosystem management and ecological restoration/conservation. Our aim is provide building blocks of knowledge contributing to increasing the predictive and application potential of ecological knowledge.
Long-term biodiversity experiments generally involve artificially assembled plant communities and find strong positive biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning, thus more species leads to multiple functions in the ecosystem. The relevance of these experimental results for naturally assembling communities in the real world, including the role of environmental context, is an important field in current ecology and of high relevance for sustainability. It is not yet clear to what extent findings from experiments are applicable in natural habitats undergoing assembly with immigration/emigration, species sorting by environmental conditions, management and historical contingency effects. In the Temperton lab we test to what extent history matters in ecology by studying priority effects caused by sowing specific plant species and functional groups whilst then allowing subsequent natural assembly. This research is of high relevance to ecological restoration, where human intervention is slotted into the dynamics of natural systems.
A key focus is on root-root interactions and the potential role of priority effects during assembly as a tool for ecosystem management and restoration. Increasingly, we are investigating the mechanisms behind priority effects (which occur when species arriving first at a site significantly affect further assembly), with a view to informing restoration of degraded sites. Priority effects generally last for quite a number of years and can lead to alternative states in vegetation, thus being of high relevance to the creation of higher (beta) diversity at landscape scales.
Since species-rich grasslands and other open habitats are currently particularly threatened by habitat loss, both due to land use intensification and land abandonment, we need incentives for farmers to conserve/restore species-rich grasslands and keep extensively managing such habitats. The status of grassy biomes does not currently reflect its importance in terms of ecosystem services they provide worldwide. Being able to send plant communities along specific desired trajectories that increase productivity and carbon storage whilst at the same time maintaining or restoring biodiversity could form an incentive for land owners to go for both and food security within an extensively managed system.