Project Details
Projekt
Relative effects of local and regional factors as drivers for plant community diversity, functional trait diversity and genetic structure of species on Baltic uplift islands
Applicants
Professor Dr. Markus Bernhardt-Römermann; Dr. Walter Durka; Professor Dr. Rolf Lutz Eckstein
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
Term
from 2014 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 260851423
The dramatic biodiversity loss in many ecosystems and the decline in associated ecosystem functioning is an important ecological challenge requiring a deeper understanding of the mechanisms driving different components of biodiversity, such as composition, structure, and function at different levels of organismic organization, i.e. genes, species and landscapes. Although we know that both local factors, such as habitat size, abiotic conditions and interactions, and regional factors, such as landscape structure and configuration, drive local species diversity, only few empirical studies in real landscapes evaluated mechanisms at various spatial scales in a comparative approach. Additionally, there is a lack of studies on local species diversity that include the functional diversity (FD) of communities because easy-to-use multi-trait indices have only recently been defined. However, these FD indices may help to understand the link between community ecology and ecosystem functioning by identifying species coexistence processes and community assembly rules, such as niche filtering and competitive exclusion. With respect to genetic diversity and differentiation of species, as another important facet of biodiversity besides species diversity and FD, landscape genetics extends the neutral population genetic model and tries to understand how landscape structure and environmental factors shape the genetic structure of species. However, despite its appeal to both basic and applied questions, only a small proportion of landscape genetic studies deal with plants. Therefore, in the current proposal we will analyse the effects of local and regional factors on species diversity and FD of plant communities and on the genetic structure of six selected plant species occurring on islands in three archipelagos in the Baltic Sea. We selected continental land uplift islands, a relatively simple type of ancient cultural landscape, since these (i) present a suitable study system to address the relative role of local and regional factors, (ii) the basic driving forces are well described by the theory of island biogeography, and (iii) there is a lack of studies on FD, landscape ecology/genetics or even studies addressing basic population genetic hypotheses. The proposal consists of two work packages, addressing objectives at the community and the species scale in three landscape tracts. The work packages are linked through a landscape- and community genetic approach, which connect the genetic structure of species (assessed through SNPs) with landscape structure/land use and community diversity, respectively. We will contribute significantly to our understanding concerning the drivers of plant diversity and gather data that address a number of unanswered questions in fundamental functional ecology and population genetics. Finally, the results of this project will add significantly to the emerging fields of landscape and community genetics.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
