The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group is part of the Institute of Landscape Ecology (ILÖK) of the University of Münster. We study the structure, function and change of terrestrial ecosystems by using plants, vegetation and soil as integrative key features in landscape ecology. We offer a broad range of courses in vegetation science and physical geography that addresses Bachelor and Master students in landscape ecology as well as studens of other disciplines of geosciences. News regarding projects and publications can also be found on X.
Final conference GiBBS - Biodiversity in the building materials industry
‘How can biodiversity in quarrying sites of the building materials industry be managed holistically?’ The final conference of the GiBBS project took place at the beginning of October with stakeholders from the building materials industry, research, nature conservation and administrative authorities at the Museum Koenig in Bonn. On the day before the event, the participants were able to gain an impression of the habitats and potential for promoting biodiversity in active quarrying during an excursion to the Quarzwerke quarrying site in Frechen. With the presentation of the project results and an intensive professional exchange among the participants, the conference marked the successful conclusion of the three-year research project.
A new paper from the BIODESERT consortium has made it onto the cover of the current issue of NATURE. Norbert Hölzel and Frederike Velbert have contributed extensive data and vegetation ecology expertise from nine study sites in the steppes and semi-deserts of central Kazakhstan to this study. Using a global data set, the article shows for the first time that plants in arid regions are characterized by an unexpectedly large diversity of functional traits beyond a critical threshold of aridity.
Link to the article: Gross, N., Maestre, F.T., Liancourt, P. et al. Unforeseen plant phenotypic diversity in a dry and grazed world. Nature 632, 808–814 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07731-3
Interdisciplinary scientific collaboration is important for successful research and the establishment of young scientists. But sometimes it gets stuck - what is the reason?
Erica Mc Gale (Uni Lausanne) and Lena Neuenkamp from our working group deal with this topic in this article. They find that there is a need for more information on the barriers to collaboration. To investigate this, they have created a short questionnaire and sincerely ask for your participation.
This will allow them to get to the bottom of collaboration hurdles in more detail in a follow-up study. It will take no more than 10 minutes and is done anonymously.
A conference titled "Forests at the Nexus of Management, Biodiversity and Carbon Storage" will be held at the Ilök from Nov. 24-26, 2023.
Topics of the event:
- Impact of forest management on forest biodiversity
- Effects of forest management on carbon storage in forests and their soils
- Transfer of the findings into forest practice
Organizers are the NABU Naturschutzstation Münsterland, the University of Münster and the Landesbetrieb Wald und Holz NRW. More info and registration is available here.
52nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society in Leipzig
The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research group was fully represented at the annual meeting of the GfÖ under the title "The Future of Biodiversity – overcoming barriers of taxa, realms and scales" in Leipzig from September 12th to 16th. It was an eventful week in the service of science full of exciting presentations, professional exchange and networking. Each member of the group also presented his or her current research in the form of a talk or poster. Our colleagues from the NABU Nature Conservation Station Münsterland, with whom we closely cooperate in the BiCO2 project, joined us at the conference.
In mid-August, 21 students of landscape ecology as well as Prof. Norbert Hölzel, Dr. Michael Meyer and Dr. Denise Rupprecht participated on a 12-day field trip to the Werdenfelser Land in Bavaria. The trip led from Rothenburg ob der Tauber via the Donaumoos to Walchensee, from where numerous day trips led to the northern limestone Alps and the alpine foothills. We were able to marvel at species-rich and largely exemplary preserved ecosystems that are unparalleled in northern Germany. Among them were, for example, middle forests in the Steigerwald, calcareous grasslands in the Jura, high and low moors on the edge of the Alps (including Murnauer Moos and Pfrühlmoos), Molinion meadows, hummock meadows, wild river floodplains, mixed mountain forests, grazed dry pine forests, subalpine and alpine vegetation and much more. At the sites visited, there was much to learn about restoration and land use in addition to exciting animal and plant species. Richer by many experiences and injury-free, the excursion arrived back at the Ilök.
New synthesis paper from the Biodiversity Exploratories
Under the leadership of our group, a synthesis paper on the results of the Seed Addition and Disturbance Experiment (SADE) within the DFG Biodiversity Exploratories has been published as an open access publication in the renowned Journal of Ecology.
With the help of a large-scale field experiment, gradients of plant diversity in grassland were generated on 73 plots by disturbance and seeding, and 12 ecosystem functions were measured in parallel over a period of 4 years. In a synopsis of the very extensive data, it could now be shown that species enrichment only leads to a significant improvement in a few ecosystem functions, such as a somewhat more closed nitrogen cycle.
A study like this was only possible within the framework of a large collaborative and long-term research platforms such as the DFG Biodiversity Exploratories and demonstrates the added value that can be generated by such networks. We would like to thank the many colleagues who contributed data, expertise and logistics to the study and look forward to further collaboration in the Biodiversity Exploratories.
Wild plants can change when propagated agriculturally:
A new study examines the rapid domestication of wild plants that are agriculturally propagated for restoration purposes.
Last Friday, our former colleague Ramona Heim was awarded the WWU Dissertation Prize by the Rector of WWU, Prof Dr Johannes Wessels, for her dissertation on "Fire ecology in Eurasian wetland and tundra ecosystems". The awarded dissertation consists of five international peer-reviewed articles, the last two of which were published this year in the very renowned journals Global Change Biology and Biogeosiences. We congratulate Ramona on the award and wish her good luck in her new position as a postdoc in the Spatial Ecology & Remote Sensing group (Prof. Dr. Gabriela Schaepman-Strub) at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
We take the awarding of the dissertation prize to Ramona Heim as an opportunity to thank her and Wieland for their work in our group since 2017. This includes such remarkable activities as the Amur Bird Project on migratory bird research in the Eastern Palaearctic, in whose annual field campaigns numerous students of landscape ecology were involved through research projects and theses, or the two expeditions with Russian and German students to the Western Siberian Forest Tundra, which led to three internationally highly regarded papers. The annual pre-Christmas meetings of the Amur Bird Project at the ILÖK in Münster since 2017 with more than 80 participants and the exchange with young Russian scientists promoted by Ramona and Wieland will certainly remain unforgettable. All these activities were crowned this year by further remarkable scientific publications, for example on the influence of fire on the niche differentiation of five sympatric bunting species on the Amur or on the influence of fire events on biodiversity and the carbon balance in the West Siberian forest tundra. We wish Ramona and Wieland all the best and much success at their new places of work in Switzerland and look forward to further collaboration.
Heim W et al. (2022) Anthropogenic fire patterns affect niche breadth and niche overlap in sympatric songbird species. Science of The Total Environment, 833, 155160 [doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.155160]
Heim RJ et al. (2022) Fire disturbance promotes biodiversity of plants, lichens and birds in the Siberian subarctic tundra. Global Change Biology, 28(3), 1048-1062 [doi: 10.1111/gcb.15963]
Heim RJ et al. (2022) Fire in lichen-rich subarctic tundra changes carbon and nitrogen cycling between ecosystem compartments but has minor effects on stocks. Biogeosciences, 19(10), 2729-2740 [doi: 10.5194/bg-19-2729-2022]
We need efficient restoration measures to halt the progressive degradation of European grassland biodiversity, functions and services due to land use intensification.
Land use extensification could be the simplest technique for grassland restoration, based on the idea that returning to the land use intensity of a reference grassland system is sufficient to restore species-rich plant communities.
The RecovFun project is testing a new holistic approach to determine the efficiency and mechanisms of grassland extensification as a restoration measure.
To this end, the RecovFUN project is investigating the mechanisms of extensification in the novel, multi-site experiments (REX, LUX) of the DFG Biodiversity Exploratories (BE) framework project.
In early summer 2017, the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group organized an expedition to the Betpak Dala, a steppe-and semi-desert region of Central Kazakhstan, to collect data on the impact of grazing on biodiversity and 'ecosystem services' in drylands along a steep climatic gradient over 350 km from the northern desert to the dry steppe. The research is part of the BIODESERT study, coordinated by Fernando T. Maestre of the Dryland Ecology and Global Change Lab at the University of Alicante in Spain. In addition to Norbert Hölzel and Frederike Velbert from our lab, Salza Palpurina and Viktoria Wagner from Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, as well as Tatyana Siderova (botanist) and Asel Esengalyeva (undergraduate student) from our partner organization ACBK (Association for the Protection of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan) were involved in the research.
The data from Kazakhstan have been incorporated into a global study published in the journal Science. Key findings were summarized in a short video.
The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research group welcomes Dr. Lena Neuenkamp as a new member! She is going to support the group as Assistant Professor in research and teaching. We are pleased to have her expertise in mycorrhizae, plant-soil interactions, grassland and restoration ecology, which perfectly complement and enrich our research in the AG.
New paper on grazing exclosure experiment
The results of a grazing exclusion experiment established in 2011 in calcareous grasslands of the Teutoburg Mountains have now been published in the renowned Journal of Applied Ecology: Rupprecht D, Jedrzejek B, Hölzel N (2022) Fallow deer foraging alone does not preserve the vegetation of traditionally sheep-grazed calcareous grasslands. Journal of Applied Ecology [doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.14253]
The 10-year study carried out with the support of IG Teuto is also the last successfully published chapter in Denise Rupprecht's dissertation and provides important insights into the current "rewilding" debate.
Quarrying sites, such as limestone quarries or gravel pits, can represent important habitats for rare animal and plant species due to their special site conditions, both during operation and after restoration. However, the establishment of endangered species can lead to conflicts between nature conservation and industry.
This is the subject of the research project launched this year under the leadership of the Institute for Ecological Economy Research in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change, the Institute for Landscape Ecology, NABU Germany and partners from the building materials industry. The overall objective of the project funded by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) is to preserve and promote biodiversity in quarrying sites and to develop a holistic concept for biodiversity management in the industry.
At the official project kickoff in Berlin in September, all participants came together for a joint workshop to discuss how such a practical, industry-wide biodiversity management can be designed. From the Institute of Landscape Ecology Katharina Schwesig has been working as a research assistant in the GiBBS project since March 2022, focusing on the design and implementation of the monitoring measures in the extraction sites of the building materials industry.
From July 31st to August 11th, 22 students of landscape ecology had an excursion under guidance of Prof. Norbert Hölzel, Dr. Michael Meyer and Dr. Denise Rupprecht with exciting insights into flora and fauna of southeastcentral Europe. The 12-day excursion went through Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary and mainly focused on landscape, land use, restoration and nature conservation. Typical animal and plant species of to the east increasingly continental landscapes could be admired, among them many species that are rare and endangered in Germany. At good health and mood all participants came back to Münster with lots of good experiences and new insights.
On December 17th, 2021 Martin Freitag successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled „Linking land use and plant community assembly to understand ecosystem processes in temperate grasslands”. With the completion of his dissertation his time at the Ilök ends. We congratulate him to his new employment at the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation and wish him all the best.
Denise Rupprecht successfully defended her doctoral thesis „Contributions to the restoration of grasslands in Central Europe“ on November 12th, 2021. After completion of her dissertation she starts her new occupation as postdoc in the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group. The last paper of her dissertation has now been successfully published: Rupprecht D, Jedrzejek B, Hölzel N (2022) Fallow deer foraging alone does not preserve the vegetation of traditionally sheep‐grazed calcareous grasslands. Journal of Applied Ecology [doi: 10.1111/1365-2664.14253]
Michael Meyer joins the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group after successful completion of his dissertation entitled “The impact of temporal crop diversification on soil constitution and arthropod community composition – patterns and processes in a long-term crop rotation experiment”. Since January 2022 he works as postdoc in the project BiCO2 where he focuses mainly on animal ecology aspects and synthesis. Welcome!
We congratulate Anna Lampei Bucharova and Christian Lampei on their new jobs in the Department of Biology at the University of Marburg and thank them for the very productive time together in Münster. Anna holds a W2 Professorship in Conservation Biology in Marburg since 01.06.2021 and Christian works now as a senior researcher in the same department. The contributions to a global study on the adaptation of white clover in urban areas, which was recently published in Science, date back to their time in Münster. In the article, the data collected by Anna and Christian in Münster are highlighted very prominently. Congratulations on this success! We wish you all the best at your new place of work and look forward to further collaboration.
