Change in grassland functional composition
With climate change extreme weather events become more 'extreme' and drought severity is expected to increase while land-use intensification is undermining grassland resistance to drought. Highly valued services of grassland are at risk.
Steckbrief
- Beteiligte Departemente Hochschule für Agrar-, Forst- und Lebensmittelwissenschaften
- Institut(e) Agronomie
- Forschungseinheit(en) Nachhaltigkeit und Ökosysteme
- Förderorganisation SNF
- Laufzeit (geplant) 01.07.2019 - 30.11.2023
- Projektleitung Dr. Andreas Stampfli
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Projektmitarbeitende
Renato Rüfenacht
Dr. Michaela Zeiter
Yvonne Désirée Künzi
Dr. Andreas Stampfli
Svitlana Prokhorova - Partner Schweizerischer Nationalfonds SNF
- Schlüsselwörter drought, ecosystem stability: recovery, resilience, resistance, temporal stability
Ausgangslage
This project aims at rising awareness of the risks from high land-use intensity and climate change providing experimental evidence for grassland stability and the thresholds of transition for plant communities of high nature value.
Vorgehen
We apply stability metrics to explore the effects of a range of severe droughts on the functional composition and functioning of grassland (1) in a multi-site experiment across functionally disparate grasslands shaped by different land-use intensity, (2) a common garden experiment with multi-species communities assembled from species with different traits, (3) using an unexplored series of biomass and species frequency data from a long-term study in semi-natural grassland.
