Biology subjects

Zieschank, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Zieschank, V..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2024

Response diversity increases functional stability but decreases diversity and compositional stability of grassland communities

The insurance hypothesis of biodiversity assumes that ecosystem stability rises with increasing biodiversity because functionally redundant species respond differently to environmental changes, allowing some species to compensate for the loss of others. We tested this hypothesis by combining extensive field data and a common garden experiment where sods originating from different regions were subjected to land-use treatments. Based on plant species-specific performance-environment relationships with abundance as performance proxy and land-use intensity as environmental variable, we calculated response dissimilarity of species-pairs. The resulting dissimilarity matrix was used to calculate response diversity (functional dispersion) of grass sods before and after land-use treatments. Our results showed that high land-use intensity decreased response diversity of plant communities both in the field as well as in the common garden. Response diversity in grass sods increased functional stability but decreased stability in terms of species diversity and composition as communities with high response diversity lost species without replacement in response to experimental land-use change, while those with low response diversity showed species turnover. We conclude that response diversity is an important component of biodiversity and discuss future research directions to refine and generalize the concept of response diversity and its role in ecosystem stability.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Tolerance to land-use changes through natural modulations of the plant microbiome

Land-use changes pose a threat to many ecosystems and are a major driver of species loss. Adaptations to altered environments or migration to more suitable habitats are potential mechanisms to resist global change, which can, however, lag behind rapid anthropogenic alterations of the environment. Our data show that rapid natural modulations of the plant microbiome in response to land-use change directly affect plant phenotype and performance, and thus increase plant tolerance to environmental changes. In a common garden experiment, the effects of the microbiome on the plant phenotype were stronger than the direct effects of fertilizer application and mowing. This finding was confirmed in a subsequent controlled laboratory experiment using plants inoculated with land-use-specific microbiomes. Therefore, natural modulations of the plant microbiome may be the key to species persistence and ecosystem stability. A prerequisite for this microbiome-mediated tolerance is the availability of diverse local sources of microorganisms that can function as a resource for rapid modulations in response to change. Thus, conservation efforts must protect microbial diversity, which can help mitigate the effects of global change and facilitate environmental and human health.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2022

Digital whole-community phenotyping to assess morphological and physiological features of plant communities in the field

Traits link observable patterns in plants to ecosystem functions and processes and help to derive general rules and predictions about responses to environmental gradients, global change and perturbations. Ecological field studies often use manual low-throughput methods to assess plant phenotypes and integrate species-specific traits to community-wide indices. In contrast, greenhouse or lab-based studies, mostly in agriculture, employ high-throughput phenotyping for plant individuals to track their growth or fertilizer and water demand. We customized an automated plant phenotyping system (PlantEye F500, Phenospex, Heerlen, The Netherlands) for its mobile application in the field for digital whole-community phenotyping (DWCP). By scanning whole plant communities, we gather, within seconds and non-invasively, multispectral and physiological information while simultaneously capturing the 3-dimensional structure of the vegetation. We demonstrated the potential of DWCP by tracking plant community responses to experimental land-use treatments over two years. DWCP captured short- and long-term changes in morphological and physiological plant community properties in response to mowing and fertilizer treatments and thus reliably informed about changes in land-use. In contrast, manually measured community-weighted mean traits and species composition remained largely unaffected and were not informative about these treatments. Thus, DWCP proved to be an efficient method to measure morphological and physiological characteristics of plant communities, complements other methods in trait-based ecology, provides indicators of ecosystem states, and may help to forecast tipping points in plant communities often associated with irreversible changes in ecosystems.

ecology↗