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Successional Generation of Functional Multidiversity

Next to climate warming, the strong decline of biodiversity represents one of the biggest challenges of humanity. Biodiversity is of indispensable value for ecosystem functioning and stability and provides multiple direct- and indirect-use values crucial for human wellbeing. Causes and consequences of multidiversity declines are increasingly studied, but similar large-scale endeavors investigating the origin of and the increase in multidiversity are missing. Such knowledge, however, provides information on the management of disturbed ecosystems in order to restore their high biodiversity. A combination of fieldwork and lab experiments will close this gap und will provide novel insights into the generation of biodiversity.

The different ecological roles of plants, animals and microorganisms in ecosystems as well as their manifold interactions demand comprehensive inventories of all organisms present in a habitat. Such inventories allow assessing the multidiversity of ecosytems, i.e. the diversity of all organisms in an ecosystem. Austrian glacier forefields provide an excellent opportunity to track the concerted and interdependent increase in plant, arthropod, and microbial diversity from virtual absence of life to vibrant ecosystems. In these landscapes colonizable substrate age is well documented (time since deglaciation) and can be correlated to the diversity of plants, arthropods, and microorganisms. Field surveys will be complemented with microcosm experiments under controlled laboratory conditions designed to investigate the mechanisms underlying the establishment of multidiverse communities. The dataset gathered during the project will be analyzed either with state-of-the-art statistical methods, or with methods that will be specifically developed. These analyses will reveal successional transformations of ecological communities and interdependencies between organisms. These approaches allow the detection of ecological processes that remain hidden using established and available statistical methods.

The major aims of the project are a) to develop statistical approaches to analyze complex multidiversity data and to answer fundamental ecological questions that will also be widely applicable to other disciplines apart from ecology and b) to gain a comprehensive understanding of ecosystem processes involved in the establishment of multidiversity. These findings will be essential for future conservation and restoration efforts of natural and anthropogenic altered ecosystems.

PI: Robert R. Junker

Team: Maximilian Hanusch, Xie He, Victoria Ruiz

Project within the START programme of the FWF