Mechanisms underlying Plant Community Productivity, Assembly and Stability

Previous work demonstrated diversity effects on plant community productivity, stability and assembly. However, underlying mechanisms are still largely unknown. Therefore, we address such mechanisms based on the long time series of plant performance data provided by the Jena Experiment, on new experimental manipulations and on complementary data about aboveground plant–plant and plant–pathogen interactions.

In work package 1, we test whether complementarity increases over time in the main and dominance experiments of the Jena Experiment. Furthermore, we compare community dynamics without and with invasion (new split-plots in main experiment) to test how community stability is related to fluctuations in plant species abundances. In a new trait-based experiment we test whether deliberately large trait differences maximize complementarity.

In work package 2, we derive and compare matrices of pair-wise plant interaction coefficients from glasshouse experiments and the main and dominance experiments. We use these interaction matrices in Lotka-Volterra approaches to predict diversity effects in mixtures.

In work package 3, we use the invasion treatment to test whether community assembly under invasion leads to convergence of diversity and productivity of all communities, but different species composition of initially different communities.

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Schmid (Project leader)
Enrica de Luca (Ph.D.)
Dr. Cameron Wagg

Prof. Dr. Markus Fischer, Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern Dr. Alexandra Weigelt, Leipzig University

• Marquard E., Weigelt A., Temperton VM., Roscher C., Schumacher J., Buchmann N., Fischer M., Weisser WW., Schmid B. (2009). Plant species richness and functional composition drive overyielding in a six-year grassland experiment. Ecology, 90(12):3290-3302. DOI: 10.1890/09-0069.1
• Marquard E., Weigelt A., Roscher C., Gubsch M., Lipowsky A., Schmid B. (2009). Positive biodiversity–productivity relationship due to increased plant density. Journal of Ecology, 97(4):696-704. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2745.2009.01521.x
• Schmid B., Balvanera P., Cardinale BJ., Godbold J., Pfisterer AB., Raffaelli D., Solan M., Srivastava DS. (2009). Consequences of species loss for ecosystem functioning: meta-analyses of data from biodiversity experiments. In: Naeem, S; Bunker, D E; Hector, A; Loreau, M; Perrings, C. Biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and human wellbeing. Oxford, UK, 14-29. ISBN 978-0-19-954795-1 (hbk.) 978-0-19-954796-8 (pbk.). DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199547951.003.0002
• Flynn DFB., Schmid B., He JS., Wolfe-Bellin KS., Bazzaz FA. (2008). Hierarchical reliability in experimental plant assemblages. Journal of Plant Ecology, 1(1):59-65. DOI: 10.1093/jpe/rtm004
• Weigelt A., Schumacher J., Roscher C., Schmid B. (2008). Does biodiversity increase spatial stability in plant community biomass? Ecology Letters, 11(4):338-347. DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2007.01145.x