Core project 5: Plants

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Markus Fischer; Dr. Daniel Prati
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: since 2011
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 194013072

The Core Project 5 «Plants» will continue to provide important background information for the other core and contributing projects and support the maintenance of the joint multi-site experiments. Hence, we will continue the monitoring of productivity on all grassland EPs and the composition and diversity of vascular plant species in all forest and grassland EPs. We will also assess the composition and diversity of the soil seed bank in forest EPs. We will further monitor plant composition and diversity, the abundance of individual species and productivity in the new multi-site experiments in grasslands as well as composition, diversity and productivity of the herbaceous understorey vegetation and the soil seed bank in the new multi-site forest experiment. Overall our comparative and experimental work will provide plant-related data and knowledge on land-use effects on long-term changes in vegetation composition, diversity and productivity and on trends of individual species in relation to changes in land use.

• DFG Programme: Infrastructure Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1374: Biodiversity Exploratories
• International Connection: Switzerland