Open Sessions will have a duration of 120min and a format of 12min talk plus 3min discussion. Abstracts can be submitted to all open sessions. Posters should be associated with a session as well.
Symposia will have a duration of 150min and a format of 20min talk plus 5min discussion. Abstracts for talks may be
. Posters can also be associated to a symposium.
20 Drivers of biodiversity change ▶
Full title: Drivers of biodiversity change in the Anthropocene
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Paola Barajas Barbosa, Kimberly L. Thompson
Contact: paola.barajas@idiv.de
Biodiversity change is tightly linked to human activities. The last century has seen an intensification in anthropogenic activities, which have led to widespread declines in biodiversity and in turn compromised the integrity and functioning of many ecosystems. The main anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity change include land use and sea use change, direct exploitation of species (e.g., fisheries, forestry), climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species. Additionally, other pressures such as human global energy consumption, economic productivity, and population growth can indirectly affect biodiversity by exacerbating or dampening one or more of the key drivers. These pressures can induce shifts in species richness and their abundance, changes in the compositions of species (i.e., biotic homogenization), as well as variation in phylogenetic and functional diversity. The goal of our session is to bring together scientists to present and discuss the current knowledge on the ways in which anthropogenic drivers cause biodiversity change across taxa, space, and time. In our session, we want to address the following questions: (i) What is the current state of knowledge regarding how anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity? (ii) What are the mechanisms by which anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity? After the presentations, we will moderate a discussion about future avenues of biodiversity research that combine research results with practical solutions to lessen the loss of biodiversity caused by anthropogenic drivers. We will conclude our session by posing questions that remain unanswered and ideas on how to approach them.
21 Pollinator responses to global change ▶
Full title: Pollinator biodiversity in the Anthropocene and its responses across scales: genes-individuals-populations-communities
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ] [ Secondary Research Area: Agroecology ]
Chairs: Antonella Soro, Belinda Kahnt, Panagiotis Theodorou, Robert Paxton
Contact: antonella.soro@zoologie.uni-halle.de
The overarching goal of the symposium is to bring participants up-to-date on the growing body of research on how anthropogenic changes impact pollinators and the ecosystem service of pollination that they provide. The past 10 years have seen an explosion of studies on bees and other pollinators, with a focus on their responses to human-induced changes such as climate change, intensification of land-use (fragmentation, degradation and loss of habitat, use of pesticides) and growing impacts of invasive species and pathogens. Although these drivers of change can have an impact on broad swathes of biodiversity, we address pollinators because they are the focus of intense research efforts, offer insight into the future directions of biodiversity change due to anthropogenic drivers, and because their decline has direct implications for plant fitness and human well-being. We broach scales by soliciting studies spanning the levels of biological organisation from genes (adaptation) through individuals (functional traits, behaviour, physiology) to populations (population genetics, population dynamics) and communities (species diversity, pollination interactions, host-parasite interactions). Our request to our potential speakers is to attempt this synthesis in their presentations. Our senior academic, Alex Klein (Uni. Freiburg), has agreed to speak; we await a response from our more junior academic, Penelope Whitehorn (KIT).
22 Biodiversity change across ecosystems ▶
Full title: The future is cross-realms - Assessing and managing large scale biodiversity change across ecosystem borders
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Sabine Wollrab, Jan-Claas Dajka, Marten Winter
Contact: sabine.wollrab@igb-berlin.de
Biodiversity change happens across taxa and ecosystems and at all levels of biodiversity (e.g. functional, taxonomic) at an unprecedented speed. Thereby detected changes in biodiversity in one ecosystem are often directly or indirectly linked to biodiversity (changes) in other connected ecosystems (terrestrial, fresh-water, marine), which might remain undetected. While much effort has been spent on the link between environmental drivers and biodiversity change within specific ecosystems, cross-ecosystem dependencies and specifically spill-over effects of biodiversity changes are currently not well understood or even recognized. Detection of change and driver attribution can be very challenging across ecosystems and cannot be thoroughly understood if research and management stops at ecosystem borders. Understanding and tackling the global biodiversity crisis need not only cross-boundary research but also management and political activities which do not stop at the ecosystem borders. From a research community perspective there are too few interactions or even integrated research activities addressing these topics and challenges across ecosystems. The terrestrial, freshwater and marine research communities don’t meet enough although there is a lot of potential to benefit and learn from each other and to ultimately collaborate. With this symposium we want to provide an opportunity for such an important and highly timely exchange. We want to bring together researchers of all fields (natural, socio-environmental, etc.) related to biodiversity change across large spatial scales who are specifically working in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. We welcome both oral and poster presentations. Biodiversity change studies beyond taxonomic changes are also highly welcome. We also strongly encourage related topics relevant to science policy and socio-economic dimensions, such as the global biodiversity framework and its targets, biodiversity related indicators or large scale management strategies and more.
23 Regional biodiversity change ▶
Full title: Regional biodiversity change analyses to support conservation management and actions
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Friedrichs-Manthey Martin, Lina Lüttgert, Shawan Chowdhury, Thore Engel
Contact: martin.friedrichs-manthey@idiv.de
Systematic and statistically meaningful time series data on biodiversity are essential in developing efficient conservation strategies, especially to implement field-level data to policy. Yet such data is vastly unavailable for most species or from most parts of the world. Here, we aim at bringing together researchers and practitioners to discuss the use of regional biodiversity data from structured monitoring and opportunistic recordings, and ideally, time series data to inform conservation management and action. Presentations are welcome from a variety of perspectives, including theoretical, experimental and applied research. We look for contributions for all taxon groups or habitat types and any type of approach, ranging from observational data to modelling. We are particularly interested in contributions focusing on the mobilization of so-far untapped data, the development of methods for data analysis and synthesis, and the integration of systematic and opportunistic data from a wide range of sources, including nature conservation societies, federal and state agencies and citizen science platforms worldwide. We also welcome contributions on how different approaches might inform decision-makers and policies. We welcome both oral and poster presentations and encourage contributions from early-career researchers. We look forward to a lively and engaging discussion on this important topic.
24 Stressors and sensory pollution ▶
Full title: Stressors and sensory pollution
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Eva Knop, Sina Blöa, Mechthild Schmitt-Jansen, Karin Frank, Markus Weitere
Contact: eva.knop@ieu.uzh.ch
Plants and animals rely on sensory systems to process environmental information that are key for reproduction and survival. Thereby many species are dependent on acoustic, visual or olfactory signals and communication. Over the past decades, however, sensory pollution, including light pollution, noise pollution, or air pollution has increased rapidly. Evidence is increasing that many organisms had no chance to adapt to it, leading to substantial effects on species behaviour, physiology, and fitness, with consequences for species occurrence and ecosystem functioning. In this session, we aim to bring together on-going work on how sensory pollution affects wildlife and ecosystem functioning. We intend to include evidence from various ecosystems and to cover a broad spectrum of ecological and evolutionary consequences at the genetic, taxa or community level. This will allow synthesizing the current knowledge in the field.
25 Land-use related modulation of climate change imp ▶
Full title: Modulation of climate change impacts on ecosystem processes and functions by land-use and management
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Lotte Korell, Martin Schädler, Thomas Reitz
Contact: lotte.korell@ufz.de
Climate change and land-use change are considered as major threats to ecosystems. Both factors can be expected to have interacting influences on ecosystem functions directly and indirectly via changes in biodiversity above- and belowground. Knowledge about these interactions is limited due to a lack of studies which investigate climate change effects under different land-use scenarios, including different management regimes. Among the processes involved in ecosystem responses to global change, in particular, those related to soil properties and processes, (plant) population dynamics, biotic interactions and microevolution were understudied in previous experiments. Examinations of these relationships require spatial and temporal scales which go beyond those realized in the majority of ecological field experiments. The aim of this session is to present current advances and to gather knowledge about land-use and management related effects of climate change on ecosystem processes and functions. A special focus will be on concepts and potentials of land management to mitigate the consequences of climate change.
26 Traits and stability ▶
Full title: Functional traits and ecosystem stability under multiple global changes
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ] [ Secondary Research Area: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) ]
Chairs: Qingqing Chen
Contact: chqq365@gmail.com, qingqing.chen@idiv.de
The stable provision of ecosystem functions and services is essential for the survival and prosperity of our humanity. Ecologists have been studying ecosystem stability since 1955. Many advances have been made, however, knowledge and application gaps remain particularly in the face of increasing global environmental changes, such as eutrophication and extreme climate events. For instance, stability has been commonly measured as temporal invariability but arguments are gaining strength for considering the dimensionality of stability (e.g. resistance, recovery, and resilience). Adding to the challenges, mounting evidence shows that global changes impact stability through multiple pathways, including direct effects and indirect effects, by altering biotic (e.g. biodiversity) and feedback to environmental factors. Disentangling the relative and simultaneous importance of pathways that global changes impact stability is therefore essential for improving our mechanistic understanding of stability and adapting management policies. In recent years, combining trait-based approaches (e.g. functional trait diversity) with taxonomic approaches (e.g. species richness) to predict ecosystem stability has gained popularity. Functional species’ traits are more directly linked to ecosystem functions than taxonomy. The rapid accumulation of trait data from global databases also greatly facilitates trait-based research. How global changes impact stability, especially resistance, recovery, and resilience through functional traits, and the relative importance of this pathway is unknown. More specifically, the goals of this session are: First, strengthen communication and collaboration across research areas. Second, develop better and more realistic methods and frameworks to quantify resistance, recovery, and resilience to climate extremes in natural systems. Third, explore the relative importance of traits for different functions, and how to incorporate intraspecific trait variation in predicting ecosystem functions and stability. Fourth, discuss how to transfer knowledge from basic research to realistic recommendations and guidelines for conservation, restoration, and management.
29 Evolutionary response to global changes ▶
Full title: Understanding the evolutionary response to global changes for biodiversity conservation
[ Primary Research Area: Evolution ] [ Secondary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Maria Mendez Camarena, Chloé Schmidt, Talita F. Amado, Alexandra Weyrich, Chloé Schmidt, Talita Ferreira Amado
Contact: maria.mendez@idiv.de
Evolutionary processes generate and maintain biodiversity, a prerequisite for keeping healthy and resilient ecosystems, and for sustaining the services they provide. Therefore, it is crucial to understand these processes and their ecological context to stop and reverse biodiversity loss at the regional and global scale. However, conservation strategies are largely focused on preserving biodiversity states rather than the processes generating biodiversity. These processes include drivers of genetic, physiological, and phenotypic intraspecific variation at individual and population levels, and how these scale up to shape interspecific variation. With this session, we aim to bring together evolutionary ecologists working across micro and macro scales with different visions on how to reverse biodiversity loss and increase our understanding of the responses to global change, by applying different measures of evolutionary processes and improving the implementation of conservation targets. At the intraspecific scale, we aim to get experts that analyse or monitor the response of individuals, populations, and species to environmental and habitat changes on the phenotypic, physiological, and/or molecular level. On an interspecific scale, experts who analyse how variation across species can lead to different responses increasing extinction rates in specific lineages, displacement of species distributions, or increasing the potential invasiveness of entire clades. Global conservation policies are beginning to more strongly consider the importance of intraspecific variation: for example, Target 4 of the newly adopted Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework includes maintaining and restoring genetic diversity within and between populations to maintain adaptive potential. The inclusion of information about the evolutionary history of organisms in conservation programmes is growing, for instance, the Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered programme (EDGE) uses an approach that combines the evolutionary distinctiveness (ED) index with species extinction risks to prioritise species for conservation. Yet, an integrative approach for the conservation of intra- and interspecific variation conservation is needed to ensure ecosystem services and sustainability. Thus, the ultimate goal of this session is to understand how linking responses to global change within and across species could inform policy-making and improve conservation strategies in an integrative way. This is crucial to help the implementation of the targets outlined in the Convention of Biological Diversity in Montreal in 2022.
52 Monitoring & management of invasive alien species ▶
Full title: Invasive alien species: their impact on biodiversity, early detection and managment
[ Primary Research Area: Monitoring ] [ Secondary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Nora Haack, Dr. Annegret Grimm-Seyfarth
Contact: nora.haack@ufu.de
The sessions’ goal will be an exchange on the current trends and methods in the monitoring and management of invasive alien species in different countries and counties. While invasive alien species are a topic that becomes more and more urgent for conservation biologists to consider, there is a shocking lack of exchange about the monitoring and management of such species, which also mostly lacks consistency among countries or even within a country. Invasive alien species are one of the biggest threats for biodiversity globally, but still there is too little communication between scientists, practitioners, and stakeholders about the measures to be taken. A platform to discuss current trends of biological invasions and the ways in which to monitor and manage them could be crucial for identifying gaps in knowledge and research on the topic.
53 Long-term data and global change ▶
Full title: Long-term and historical data: prerequisites to reveal changes in ecosystems in the light of global change
[ Primary Research Area: Monitoring ] [ Secondary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Mark Frenzel, Jörg Müller
Contact: mark.frenzel@ufz.de
In the age of global change there is an urgent need to continuously track the status of ecosystems in order to watch the development and related impact on functions and processes in the long run. The importance is self-evident in case of the world population growth of humans over centuries or the CO2 measurements started some decades ago nowadays representing one of the most important fever curves of our planet. However, gathering long-term biodiversity data is mostly out of scope considering the usual run time of projects. This issue is addressed by networks focusing on long-term ecosystem research like the international ILTER (https://www.ilter.network), the building of the European research infrastructure eLTER (https://elter-ri.eu) and national networks like the German LTER-D (https://lter-d.de) which are dedicated to create, combine and analyse long-term ecosystem research data. In this session we will open the floor for people presenting studies based on already established time series and those which recently started but are intended to run for a long time. However, due to generation cycles of organisms ‘long-term data’ is different in microbial ecology and large mammal ecology. Moreover, studies combining historical with recent data are welcome as well. Presenters are expected to demonstrate the relevance of their work considering (long-term) perspectives of communities and ecosystems. If you dare, you may even give an outlook for the future development and consequences based on the insights of your study. We look forward to 'lessons learned' in various aspects, e.g. in terms of ground breaking concepts for future data gathering and monitoring or consequences for required actions.
1 Innovations for sustainable grazing systems ▶
Full title: - Livestock as ecosystem engineers: Innovations for sustainable grazing systems
[ Primary Research Area: Agroecology ]
Chairs: Juliane Horn, Friederike Riesch, Frank Jauker
Contact: juliane.horn@uni-goettingen.de
Large herbivores in the landscape contribute to ecosystem functioning and biodiversity. But most livestock today are housed indoors. A transition to more pasture-based livestock production might contribute to halt the loss of biodiversity and increase ecosystem services from the agricultural landscape. The session “Livestock as ecosystem engineers: Innovations for sustainable grazing systems” is a forum for research on technological innovations that could help farmers to implement grazing as a means for ecologically and economically sustainable livestock production. For example, innovative fencing technologies can reduce the time and labour required for grazing and could facilitate grazing in remote areas as well as excluding grazers from vulnerable areas. Remote sensing via satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles can provide valuable information on forage quantity and quality but might also allow to identify ecologically sensitive areas or even endangered species. Technological innovations may also be used to improve agri-environmental schemes, for example by better monitoring of biodiversity-enhancing grazing regimes. Contributions on digital technologies used in other fields of research or production (e.g. forestry, arable farming) will be considered if they have potential to be applied in grassland systems as well. In addition, the session addresses the sociological challenges related to changes and innovations in production methods, welcoming contributions from transformative research that aim to integrate the needs and perspectives of different stakeholder groups when co-creating a more environmentally- and biodiversity-friendly future of livestock production.
2 Biological control for sustainable agroecosystems ▶
Full title: Quantifying and enhancing biological control in temperate and tropical agroecosystems
[ Primary Research Area: Agroecology ]
Chairs: Marco Ferrante, Carolina Ocampo-Ariza, Catrin Westphal
Contact: marco.ferrante@uni-goettingen.de
Effective global conservation strategies cannot rely uniquely on sparing land where species can thrive undisturbed; we should also foster biodiversity in contexts where interactions between humans and other species are unavoidable. With 46% of Earth´s habitable land currently used for agriculture, the transition to more sustainable agricultural systems is critical to secure the future of global biodiversity and ecosystem service provision, and achieving this requires a good understanding of service-providing taxa, and their ecological dynamics. In crop fields, biological control agents (e.g., pest predators, weed seed granivores, parasites and parasitoids) are crucial for maintaining populations of potential pests below crop damage thresholds. In this session, we will gather the latest advances on the study of biological control in agroecosystems, identifying differences and similarities between tropical and temperate regions. The goals of the symposium are twofold: 1) to provide an overview of the tools available to monitor biological control agents, quantify their activity, and establish guidelines for best research practice and 2) to assess the effectiveness of novel farming strategies for the conservation of biological control services (e.g., agri-environment-climate measures, diversification, and other management strategies) and to identify contexts (e.g., crop type, landscape complexity level, biome) in which specific strategies succeed. We expect the discussions from this session to help us identify research gaps, strengths and future research priorities in the field of biological control.
3 Advances in natural pest control research ▶
Full title: Think functional: understanding natural pest control services in agricultural landscapes
[ Primary Research Area: Agroecology ]
Chairs: Ute Fricke, Ricardo Perez-Alvarez
Contact: fricke@geobotanik.uni-hannover.de
The widespread use of chemical-synthetic pesticides has been identified as a considerable contributor to declines in biodiversity and poses significant hazards to both the environment and human health. To mitigate these negative impacts and maintain high crop yields, sustainable alternatives to chemical-synthetic pesticides are needed. Natural pest control services have been proposed as a potential solution to this problem. However, for these services to be effectively implemented and harnessed, predictability is essential. Understanding how ecological conditions (e.g. habitat configuration) will influence pest regulation by natural enemy communities, is crucial for reliable predictions of natural pest control services across agricultural landscapes. Functional ecology, a multidisciplinary field that integrates the study of organismal traits and ecosystem processes, offers a promising approach for addressing these questions. By examining the interactions between landscapes, the traits of natural enemy communities and climate, functional ecology can provide insight into how natural pest control services can be influenced and managed under current and future climatic conditions. Recent efforts have also focused on developing archetype models that incorporate multiple organismic traits and responses to landscape parameters, offering new opportunities for understanding and managing natural pest control services. Further research is needed to improve the mechanistic understanding of natural pest control services and provide a basis for sound management recommendations. Drawing on examples from various countries and cropping systems, this session aims to highlight recent advances in natural pest management research that will improve the predictability of natural pest control services and decrease the reliance on pesticides.
4 Biodiversity Crisis - Focus on Agricultural Landscape ▶
Full title: The Biodiversity Crisis - Focus on Agricultural Landscape
[ Primary Research Area: Agroecology ]
Chairs: Manuela Sann, Lea von Berg, Jonas Frank, Jes Hines
Contact: manuela.sann@uni-hohenheim.de
Agroecosystems have been an integrated component of human cultural landscapes for centuries. In recent years, however, multiple competing demands for increased crop productivity, economic viability, functionality, and stability of agroecosystem have led to heated debate about how to best use our global lands. It has been suggested that protecting and promoting biodiversity in landscapes may lead to win-win scenarios for agriculture. In this session speakers will discuss evidence for relationships between biodiversity and practices that enhance productivity, stability, and economic output in agroecosystems, with a focus on three topics: (1) Monitoring biodiversity patterns in agricultural landscapes, (2) Modern agricultural practices and consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (e.g. mowing, meadow management, pesticide application, agroforestry) (3) Science communication to promote connection between biodiversity research, agricultural policy, and society. Each of the speakers will use a marriage of basic and applied ecology to pose modern solutions to agricultural problems. The scientists presenting in this session work across taxonomic and ecological boundaries (e.g. soils, aboveground-belowground food webs, plants, pollinators) and across ecological scales (e.g. patch, landscape).
5 Agricultural transformation for more Biodiversity ▶
Full title: Biodiversity-enhancing measures in agricultural landscapes: key insights for a system transformation
[ Primary Research Area: Agroecology ]
Chairs: Dr. Dennis Baulechner, Prof. Dr. Emily Poppenborg Martin
Contact: dennis.baulechner@allzool.bio.uni-giessen.de
One of the main drivers of biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes is the loss of structural heterogeneity. There are, however, different efforts to counteract these losses by integrating habitat elements such as flowering strips or modifying farming systems to include strip-, intercropping or agroforestry. It is widely understood that a turnover of current agricultural practices, involving both small-scale and large-scale, systemic transformations, is necessary to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in these landscapes. Experimental, and often short-term, applications of biodiversity-enhancing measures in farmed landscapes show promising results with positive effects on a variety of functional animal groups including pollinators and natural enemies of pests. However, efforts assessing the impact of biodiversity-enhancing measures at multiple scales, including inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives of these impacts, currently remain fragmented with little effort at harmonizing essential insights for implementation. To accomplish the required system change it is now necessary to integrate these practices in existing agricultural systems, considering economic and social factors, and including farmers in the design and decision-making process. This session aims to foster an exchange and synthesis between research projects which investigate applied structural changes in agricultural systems and to discuss the possibilities of future implementation in everyday agricultural practices.
6 20 years Jena Experiment ▶
Full title: 20th anniversary of the Jena Experiment - Insights from two decades of integrative functional biodiversity research
[ Primary Research Area: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) ]
Chairs: Nico Eisenhauer, Wolfgang Weisser, Anne Ebeling, Christiane Roscher
Contact: nico.eisenhauer@idiv.de
The functioning and service provisioning of ecosystems in the face of anthropogenic environmental and biodiversity change is a cornerstone of ecological research. The last three decades of biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) research have provided compelling evidence for the significant positive role of biodiversity in the functioning of many ecosystems. Since the early 2000s, the German research community has contributed significantly to this field by a series of three DFG-funded Research Units. In this session, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Jena Experiment by looking back at past achievements and by outlining the future of functional biodiversity research. The Research Units within the Jena Experiment have played unique roles in this context by taking an interdisciplinary and integrative approach to capture whole-ecosystem responses to changes in biodiversity. The focus of the first phase was studying multitrophic communities and element cycles. In the second phase, we took a trait-based approach to mechanistically understand and predict BEF relationships. In the running phase, we explore variation in community assembly processes across trophic levels and resulting differences in biotic interactions as determinants of the long-term BEF relationship as well as plant diversity effects on plant trait expression and eco-evolutionary processes, and subsequent feedback effects on biotic interactions and ecosystem functions. The Jena Experiment is one of the longest-running biodiversity experiments in the world, allowing to study biodiversity-stability relationships of multiple ecosystem functions as well as climatic drivers and buffers of BEF relationships. In this session, we plan to invite and accept a large diversity of speakers that provide inside- and outside perspectives on the main findings of the Jena Experiment (focus on results after the review by Weissert et al. 2017 and the book by Eisenhauer et al. 2019), how we can build on those to advance the field in the future, and how we can apply the knowledge to manage ecosystems in a sustainable way. We plan to write a perspectives paper based on the contributions to this session, inviting all speakers, poster presenters, and researchers actively engaged in discussions during the session.
7 Cross-boundary BEF effects ▶
Full title: Biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning across terrestrial-aquatic boundaries
[ Primary Research Area: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) ]
Chairs: Michael Scherer-Lorenzen, Jana Petermann
Contact: michael.scherer@biologie.uni-freiburg.de
Biodiversity – ecosystem functioning (BEF) research has developed strongly during the last decades and has become one of the most vibrant fields of ecology. However, almost all BEF work has only worked within ecosystems, i.e. quantifying the effects of changing biodiversity within one target ecosystem, neglecting the functional links that exist between ecosystems. There are important fluxes of material, energy and organisms across ecosystem boundaries, and these fluxes from “donor” to “recipient” ecosystems can subsidise ecosystem processes in the “recipient” system. Thus, changes in biodiversity within a “donor” ecosystem could also have cascading effects on the functioning of “recipient” systems. Concepts of resource subsidies and allochthony have been mainly developed for terrestrial-aquatic meta-ecosystems, but whether BEF effects across such ecosystem boundaries are happening remains rather unknown. In this session, we want to join scientists from two research communities that mainly worked independently in the past, namely from BEF research and from research on terrestrial-aquatic linkages, to present ideas, concepts and results. Thus, we welcome contributions from empirical, experimental, conceptual or modelling work. We focus on work at the terrestrial-aquatic interface to illustrate the case, because most results for cross-boundary BEF effects currently come from this type of boundary. Our topic is perfectly suited to the topic of the GfÖ Annual Meeting "The Future of Biodiversity – overcoming barriers of taxa, realms and scales" because we explicitly aim to overcome the current “within-ecosystem” view of BEF science to a broader meta-ecosystem perspective. Our session will complement the session suggested by Wollrab, Dajka and Winter (“The future is cross-realms - Assessing and managing large scale biodiversity change across ecosystem borders”), which focuses on cross-boundary change of biodiversity, while our session explicitly focuses on BEF effects that spill-over across ecosystem boundaries. If both sessions would be accepted, we therefore recommend to arrange them one after the other. We also suggest a joint panel discussion emerging from both sessions. The symposium is planned with some invited speakers, as well as colleagues who apply for our session via the normal registration process.
8 From functional diversity to health ▶
Full title: Relationships between functional diversity, food security and human well-being under ecological intensification
[ Primary Research Area: Biodiversity and Health ]
Chairs: Klaus Birkhofer, Roman Bucher, Péter Batáry
Contact: klaus.birkhofer@b-tu.de
It is widely accepted that increasing agricultural intensification reduces biodiversity with far-reaching consequences for ecosystem functioning and human well-being (Cardinale et al. 2012, Nature). The incorporation of traits (i.e. functional diversity) is expected to improve our ability to understand and predict ecosystem functioning under different local land use regimes or in different landscape contexts (Hooper et al. 2005, Ecological Monographs). It is intriguing to see whether traits affected by agricultural intensification also affect ecosystem functioning. In this session, we aim to extend further the land use-functional diversity-ecosystem functioning cascade towards human and livestock well-being (see Ulrich et al. 2023, People and Nature). We are interested in contributions that address effects on essential ecosystem services such as soil nutrient cycling, wild pollination or conservation biocontrol on the quantity and quality of food and livestock fodder. Furthermore, we seek contributions that elaborate on how landscapes under different management regimes can contribute to human well-being by, for example, increasing their recreational value. This session allows us to deepen and expand our understanding of the complex land use-functional diversity-ecosystem service-health interplay. We are looking for examples of how agricultural management can promote functional diversity and ecosystem functioning and, at the same time, increase food security as ideal strategies for sustainable ecological intensification.
9 Ecosystem health: From theory to practice ▶
Full title: Innovative approaches for the evaluation of ecosystem health: From theory to practice
[ Primary Research Area: Biodiversity and Health ]
Chairs: Tim Newbold, Alfred Burian, Dr. Octavio M. Pérez Maqueo, Julián Equihua
Contact: t.newbold@ucl.ac.uk
The accurate and efficient assessment of ecosystem health is a crucial step in order to evaluate and respond to the many impacts of human society on nature. However, it’s still an open problem how to quantify the state of ecosystems, be it ecosystem health, integrity or intactness as the complexity, diversity and variability of natural systems makes it very challenging to summarise their state in a small set of indicators or even in a single number. Furthermore, there is even little consensus on what these concepts refer to and how they relate to each other. Nonetheless, the high policy relevancy of the topic has led to a broad spectrum of approaches that often differ among countries and organism groups. This has been compounded by the availability of ecological big-data provided by earth observation, advancements in genetic monitoring and in-situ sensors as well as methodological break-throughs in data analysis techniques. In this session, we welcome conceptual, modelling and applied contributions that tackle the broad thematic spectrum of ecosystem health, integrity and intactness. The aim of the session is to provide an overview of currently applied approaches and stimulate a discussion on both the conceptual underpinning of ecosystem health and its integration in current and future environmental policy. Possible additional outcome: A additional aim of this session is to imitate a synthesis group on the topic targeting to evaluate the potential of (i) big-data approaches to support ecosystem health assessments, (ii) conceptual approaches to facilitate ecosystem health approaches in countries/ ecosystems with little base-line knowledge and (iii) possible indices to support global assessments.
10 Animal chemical ecology ▶
Full title: Animal chemical ecology
[ Primary Research Area: Chemical and molecular ecology ]
Chairs: Anja Widdig, Marlene Kücklich, Omer Nevo
Contact: anja.widdig@eva.mpg.de, marlen.kuecklich@uni-leipzig.de, omer.nevo@idiv.de
Interactions within and between species can operate via multiple channels, of which the most ancient and common is chemical. Chemical cues and signals guide pollinating animals to flowers, seed dispersing animals to fruit, and predator to prey. They facilitate species, kin and mate recognition across all major animal lineages, from invertebrates to mammals, including humans. Many of these signals are conflicting and intertwined: the sweet scent of a fruit attracts a seed dispersing animal, but also antagonistic insects. As such, it is safe to say that all animal species operate in a complex chemical environment - they all “speak chemistry”, and that this diversity of taxa and interaction types are often governed by similar patterns and principles. Recent years have seen technical and computational developments which have transformed the field of chemical ecology and brought it to the -omics age with the development of metabolomics. This opened new opportunities to understand the chemical environments animals operate in: as senders or receivers of signals and cues emitted by con- or heterospecifics, including chemical interactions due to human disturbance (e.g. through chemical contaminations or pesticides). Yet much of the focus in ecometabolomics and chemical ecology is still around plants, possibly with the exception of their interactions with invertebrates. As such, many of the chemical processes driving animal-plant interactions and intraspecific interactions, their evolution and contemporary functioning, and also how animals will respond to an increasingly changing world still lie in the dark, particularly for vertebrates. This session will cover these latest developments and explore how chemical interactions underlie ecological or human-induced processes between animals and plants, or within animal species. Its main objective will be to bring to the front the application of chemical methods to study animal sensory behavior, communication, and response to human-generated novel chemical environments. It will identify common themes that cross major taxonomic lineages and trophic levels, and hence facilitate future collaborations and synthesis including biodiversity protection.
11 Unravelling plant chemodiversity ▶
Full title: The HOW and WHY of plant chemodiversity
[ Primary Research Area: Chemical and molecular ecology ]
Chairs: Dominik Ziaja, Caroline Müller, Robin Heinen
Contact: dominik.ziaja@uni-bielefeld.de
Plants produce an intriguingly high number of specialised (secondary) metabolites that mediate plant-environment interactions. Advances in analytical instruments and metabolomics approaches now allow for high-throughput screening of thousands of these compounds, which has boosted the research of phytochemical diversity, also called ‘chemodiversity’. Considering the different layers that contribute to the complexity of ecosystems, chemodiversity is an important dimension of biodiversity. Current studies investigate different domains of chemodiversity, enhancing our understanding of the various ecological functions of plant chemodiversity and its evolution, and ranging from ecosystem research to theoretical modelling and analyses of the biosynthetic machineries. Moreover, a sound understanding of the HOW and WHY of plant chemodiversity might provide applications in agriculture, improving sustainable plant production. For example, wild and crop species of the Brassicaceae have been broadly studied for the evolutionary drivers of glucosinolate diversity and its implications for plant-environment interactions. Further studies on metabolite diversity of several plant species led to approaches for a profound quantification of chemodiversity. Insights from these studies are of high value to increase the resistance of crops and enhance sustainable agriculture. These examples highlight the different angles from which chemodiversity needs to be investigated. To improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of plant chemodiversity, further interdisciplinary research is needed. Therefore, we will bring together researchers from different disciplines, including ecology, chemical ecology, evolution, modelling and biochemistry. This session’s focus lies specifically on plant chemodiversity and has two major goals: Firstly, presentations on various aspects of chemodiversity are welcomed, which will help bridging - and forming collaborations across – multiple disciplines. Second, a discussion session with all participants shall identify knowledge gaps and pressing questions, and generate a framework to move plant chemodiversity research forward into ecological research in a meaningful way.
15 Landscape-scale biodiversity conservation ▶
Full title: Co-design of biodiversity conservation throughout farmland at the landscape scale
[ Primary Research Area: Conservation and restoration ]
Chairs: Maria Kernecker, Annika Hass
Contact: maria.kernecker@zalf.de
Biodiversity conservation and restoration in farmland across Europe has in large part relied on agri-environmental measures implemented by individual land users, farmers, and farms. More recently however, it has become increasingly clear that biodiversity conservation and restoration in farmland requires a landscape scale approach, as species move beyond the boundaries of individual fields. Therefore, there is an urgent need to re-design agri-environmental schemes to match the relevant spatial scales for farmland species by considering landscape composition and configuration. However, working at the landscape scale requires the coordination of diverse actors across land use systems to effectively implement measures. As such, it is essential to bring together science and practice in the co-design of measures while considering social, ecological and economic viewpoints. Currently, there are several projects across and outside of Germany, that are using co-design methods to explore i) which biodiversity conservation measures are appropriate for distinct study regions, ii) how landscape scale collaborative measures can be implemented, iii) how their success is monitored, and iv) how stakeholders perceive these measures. The aim of this symposium is to gather insights from diverse projects and identify shared and isolated challenges, successes, and synergies in moving forward. We will specifically discuss projects’ experiences in the process of co-designing landscape-scale measures, implementing and monitoring them. Lessons from different projects in diverse regions and focused on different taxa will lay the basis upon which future directions can be discussed. We welcome contributions focusing on the coordination level of these projects or on specific research results from ecological, social or economic field studies. After sharing results and reflections from their work, presenters will be asked to join in a discussion to identify key lessons and next steps. This will allow us to gain a more holistic understanding of science-practice collaborations for more effective landscape scale biodiversity conservation and restoration efforts.
18 Conservation and climate change mitigation ▶
Full title: Biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation
[ Primary Research Area: Conservation and restoration ]
Chairs: Nina Farwig, Anna Lampei-Bucharova, Johannes Kollmann, Wolfgang Weisser
Contact: farwig@staff.uni-marburg.de
Climate change is one major threat for both biodiversity and human well-being. The loss of biodiversity can be counteracted by conservation of near-natural ecosystems and restoration of degraded areas, which can also contribute to mitigation of climate change. Other measures for climate-change mitigation, like generating renewable energy or carbon storage, are more controversial, and their effect on biodiversity is not fully understood. This calls for a mechanistic understanding of the relationship between the state of ecosystems (biodiversity conservation) and their climate-change mitigation performance, e.g., in terms of carbon storage, sustainable energy production. This session aims at compiling the latest knowledge on synergies and trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and climate-change mitigation.
20 Drivers of biodiversity change ▶
Full title: Drivers of biodiversity change in the Anthropocene
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Paola Barajas Barbosa, Kimberly L. Thompson
Contact: paola.barajas@idiv.de
Biodiversity change is tightly linked to human activities. The last century has seen an intensification in anthropogenic activities, which have led to widespread declines in biodiversity and in turn compromised the integrity and functioning of many ecosystems. The main anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity change include land use and sea use change, direct exploitation of species (e.g., fisheries, forestry), climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species. Additionally, other pressures such as human global energy consumption, economic productivity, and population growth can indirectly affect biodiversity by exacerbating or dampening one or more of the key drivers. These pressures can induce shifts in species richness and their abundance, changes in the compositions of species (i.e., biotic homogenization), as well as variation in phylogenetic and functional diversity. The goal of our session is to bring together scientists to present and discuss the current knowledge on the ways in which anthropogenic drivers cause biodiversity change across taxa, space, and time. In our session, we want to address the following questions: (i) What is the current state of knowledge regarding how anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity? (ii) What are the mechanisms by which anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity? After the presentations, we will moderate a discussion about future avenues of biodiversity research that combine research results with practical solutions to lessen the loss of biodiversity caused by anthropogenic drivers. We will conclude our session by posing questions that remain unanswered and ideas on how to approach them.
22 Biodiversity change across ecosystems ▶
Full title: The future is cross-realms - Assessing and managing large scale biodiversity change across ecosystem borders
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Sabine Wollrab, Jan-Claas Dajka, Marten Winter
Contact: sabine.wollrab@igb-berlin.de
Biodiversity change happens across taxa and ecosystems and at all levels of biodiversity (e.g. functional, taxonomic) at an unprecedented speed. Thereby detected changes in biodiversity in one ecosystem are often directly or indirectly linked to biodiversity (changes) in other connected ecosystems (terrestrial, fresh-water, marine), which might remain undetected. While much effort has been spent on the link between environmental drivers and biodiversity change within specific ecosystems, cross-ecosystem dependencies and specifically spill-over effects of biodiversity changes are currently not well understood or even recognized. Detection of change and driver attribution can be very challenging across ecosystems and cannot be thoroughly understood if research and management stops at ecosystem borders. Understanding and tackling the global biodiversity crisis need not only cross-boundary research but also management and political activities which do not stop at the ecosystem borders. From a research community perspective there are too few interactions or even integrated research activities addressing these topics and challenges across ecosystems. The terrestrial, freshwater and marine research communities don’t meet enough although there is a lot of potential to benefit and learn from each other and to ultimately collaborate. With this symposium we want to provide an opportunity for such an important and highly timely exchange. We want to bring together researchers of all fields (natural, socio-environmental, etc.) related to biodiversity change across large spatial scales who are specifically working in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. We welcome both oral and poster presentations. Biodiversity change studies beyond taxonomic changes are also highly welcome. We also strongly encourage related topics relevant to science policy and socio-economic dimensions, such as the global biodiversity framework and its targets, biodiversity related indicators or large scale management strategies and more.
23 Regional biodiversity change ▶
Full title: Regional biodiversity change analyses to support conservation management and actions
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Friedrichs-Manthey Martin, Lina Lüttgert, Shawan Chowdhury, Thore Engel
Contact: martin.friedrichs-manthey@idiv.de
Systematic and statistically meaningful time series data on biodiversity are essential in developing efficient conservation strategies, especially to implement field-level data to policy. Yet such data is vastly unavailable for most species or from most parts of the world. Here, we aim at bringing together researchers and practitioners to discuss the use of regional biodiversity data from structured monitoring and opportunistic recordings, and ideally, time series data to inform conservation management and action. Presentations are welcome from a variety of perspectives, including theoretical, experimental and applied research. We look for contributions for all taxon groups or habitat types and any type of approach, ranging from observational data to modelling. We are particularly interested in contributions focusing on the mobilization of so-far untapped data, the development of methods for data analysis and synthesis, and the integration of systematic and opportunistic data from a wide range of sources, including nature conservation societies, federal and state agencies and citizen science platforms worldwide. We also welcome contributions on how different approaches might inform decision-makers and policies. We welcome both oral and poster presentations and encourage contributions from early-career researchers. We look forward to a lively and engaging discussion on this important topic.
24 Stressors and sensory pollution ▶
Full title: Stressors and sensory pollution
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Eva Knop, Sina Blöa, Mechthild Schmitt-Jansen, Karin Frank, Markus Weitere
Contact: eva.knop@ieu.uzh.ch
Plants and animals rely on sensory systems to process environmental information that are key for reproduction and survival. Thereby many species are dependent on acoustic, visual or olfactory signals and communication. Over the past decades, however, sensory pollution, including light pollution, noise pollution, or air pollution has increased rapidly. Evidence is increasing that many organisms had no chance to adapt to it, leading to substantial effects on species behaviour, physiology, and fitness, with consequences for species occurrence and ecosystem functioning. In this session, we aim to bring together on-going work on how sensory pollution affects wildlife and ecosystem functioning. We intend to include evidence from various ecosystems and to cover a broad spectrum of ecological and evolutionary consequences at the genetic, taxa or community level. This will allow synthesizing the current knowledge in the field.
25 Land-use related modulation of climate change imp ▶
Full title: Modulation of climate change impacts on ecosystem processes and functions by land-use and management
[ Primary Research Area: Environmental and Biodiversity Change ]
Chairs: Lotte Korell, Martin Schädler, Thomas Reitz
Contact: lotte.korell@ufz.de
Climate change and land-use change are considered as major threats to ecosystems. Both factors can be expected to have interacting influences on ecosystem functions directly and indirectly via changes in biodiversity above- and belowground. Knowledge about these interactions is limited due to a lack of studies which investigate climate change effects under different land-use scenarios, including different management regimes. Among the processes involved in ecosystem responses to global change, in particular, those related to soil properties and processes, (plant) population dynamics, biotic interactions and microevolution were understudied in previous experiments. Examinations of these relationships require spatial and temporal scales which go beyond those realized in the majority of ecological field experiments. The aim of this session is to present current advances and to gather knowledge about land-use and management related effects of climate change on ecosystem processes and functions. A special focus will be on concepts and potentials of land management to mitigate the consequences of climate change.
28 Evolution in biodiversity research ▶
Full title: Evolution in biodiversity research
[ Primary Research Area: Evolution ]
Chairs: Bojana Stojanova, JF Niek Scheepens, Jana Ebersbach, Michael Gerth, Omer Nevo
Contact: bojana.stojanova@osu.cz
Ecological systems are a happy mess of actors across trophic levels, ranging from microorganisms to blue whales. The diversity of life and complexity of interspecific interactions are a product of physiological, anatomical, and behavioral traits, which following Darwin are to a large degree considered to be the product of selective pressures exerted by the unique biotic and abiotic characteristics of a species’ ecological niche. At the same time, modern evolutionary biology recognizes many non-adaptive forces driving trait evolution, among them genetic drift and various constraints. Moreover, it is increasingly recognized that evolutionary change can occur over short time scales, and can also be mediated by hereditary non-genetic variation. The study of adaptation and its significance in trait evolution therefore requires creative and complementary approaches that tackle the problem from different perspectives and across different time scales.
The session will bring together a diverse set of researchers working on far-ranging systems and approaches, including novel and innovative research techniques, to study adaptation to past and present environmental change. As such, it will be a primer of evolutionary thinking which may be applied for understanding ecological processes and informing conservation efforts.
31 Changing forests ▶
Full title: Changing forests â Implications for diversity and challenges for forest management in times of climate change
[ Primary Research Area: Forest Ecology ]
Chairs: Franka Huth, Nadja Rüger, Petia Nikolova, Alexander Tischer, Michael U. T. Meyer
Contact: franka.huth@tu-dresden.de, nadja.rueger@idiv.de, j.woellecke@nabu-station.de, petia.nikolova@wsl.ch, alexander.tischer@uni-jena.de,
Forest ecosystems worldwide are affected to varying degrees by climate change, which is not only manifested by a continuous rise in temperature, but also by increasingly frequent weather extremes, as well as by the activity of native and invasive pests and pathogens. At the same time, forests have a high potential to mitigate climate change risks and impacts on biodiversity, and societal demands on forest ecosystems are diversifying. In addition to providing wood as a raw material, these demands include the provision of habitat for biodiversity conservation, carbon storage and sequestration, soil erosion control, air cooling, and recreational value, among others. Establishing adapted and resilient forests to ensure the provision of diverse ecosystem services poses major challenges, especially for forestry management. Due to the complexity of forest ecosystems and their tight relationship with society, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research approaches are needed to assess the global change impacts on forests and to develop strategies to strengthen their adaptive capacity to provide ecosystems services in the future.
Studies on a broad range of forest ecology research areas and those concerned with deriving practical forest management measures and strategies for multipurpose forest management are invited. The session will be divided into the following two sub-sessions:
Sub-session 1: All areas of forest ecology research or research approaches to the impacts of climate change on forests at all scales (genetic, physiological, structural, compositional, floristic, faunistic etc.)
Sub-session 2: Approaches that address societal demands and the associated development of adapted multi-objective forest management strategies and specific silvicultural measures.
The presented research results on forest adaptations to climate change and emerging societal demands will be discussed in depth in a linked workshop in order to pursue the question of how these results can be integrated into practical recommendations for action.
33 Auenschutz und Renaturierung ▶
Full title: Schutz und Renaturierung von Auenökosystemen
[ Primary Research Area: German Day (Wednesday 13.09.2023) ]
Chairs: Johannes Kollmann, Anna Bucharova, Nina Farwig, Wolfgang Weisser
Contact: johannes.kollmann@tum.de
Intakte Auenökosysteme habe eine hohe Biodiversität vieler Artengruppen, sie beeinflussen den Landschaftswasserhaushalt und wirken als Stoffsenken. Durch Regulierung der Flüsse sind fast alle Auen in Mitteleuropa heute in einem schlechten Zustand, und daher ist die Renaturierung von Auen ein strategisches Ziel des Naturschutzes in Deutschland. Dabei kann eine Förderung der Biodiversität mit verbessertem Hochwasserschutz durch Deicherhöhung, Seitengerinne und Retentionsräume kombiniert werden. Dazu müssen die technischen Anforderungen mit denen der zu fördernden Ökosysteme kombiniert werden. Außerdem muss die landschaftliche Verknüpfung von aquatischen Habitaten mit dem Ufer, mit Röhricht, Flut- und Magerrasen, Gebüschen sowie Wäldern beachtet werden. Die Session bringt praktische Erfahrung aus ganz unterschiedlichen Systemen und Regionen in Deutschland zusammen. Dabei sollen Elemente des ‚Aktionsplans Natürlicher Klimaschutz‘ diskutiert werden.
34 Best Practice for Mainstreaming Biodiversity ▶
Full title: Best Practice for Mainstreaming Biodiversity: How to Transfer Current Knowledge on Biodiversity into Real Action
[ Primary Research Area: Governance ]
Chairs: Prof. Dr. Arne Cierjacks, Prof. Dr. Leonie Fischer
Contact: arne.cierjacks@htw-dresden.de
Mankind is facing the sixth mass extinction in the Earth’s history. Scientific knowledge on the impact of human action on biodiversity, and on possible measures to counteract species loss, has considerably increased during the last decades. However, this has not contributed to stop or even slow down species extinction. In general, implementation of possible approaches remains challenging owing to political, economic, and/or societal constraints. This session aims at showcasing best practice examples of successful implementation of biodiversity knowledge in administration, companies, and stakeholder groups, thereby mainstreaming biodiversity in different sectors. Possible action is required on all scales including international, national, regional, and local levels. Moreover, indigenous knowledge along with grass-root initiatives may play a pivotal role to improve the valuation of biological diversity. Apart from agriculture, forestry, and fishery, urban and industrial environments should explicitly be taken into account, where human impact is particularly pronounced and numerous secondary effects on biodiversity are present – yet new potential for species conservation and support may arise in transformation. The compilation of best practice for mainstreaming biodiversity in this session may exemplify how scientific knowledge can contribute to improved species conservation. It further highlights that implementation may already be an important aspect when planning scientific projects.
36 Macroecology ▶
Full title: Macroecology: understanding the processes underlying biodiversity patterns and responses to global change
[ Primary Research Area: Macroecology ]
Chairs: Susanne Fritz, Alke Voskamp
Contact: susanne.fritz@senckenberg.de
Macroecology is the study of ecological patterns at large spatial, temporal, or taxonomic scales, and aims to understand the fundamental processes that generate large-scale biodiversity patterns. The discipline is therefore ideally placed to identify the drivers and understand the mechanisms that determine the responses of individual species, species communities and ecosystems to ongoing environmental change. This is particularly relevant for the conference theme “The Future of Biodiversity”, because global environmental change (i.e. climate and land-use change) currently drives ongoing global biodiversity loss. The prediction of future biotic responses to global change across taxa, realms, and scales necessitates detailed knowledge and understanding of biodiversity patterns and processes. This session aims to bring together contributions that focus on understanding the impacts of environmental change on diversity patterns and processes across varying scales, using spatial or temporal approaches. We welcome submissions from all macroecological fields that investigate past, present, or future responses of biodiversity to environmental change, whether empirical, conceptual or methodological. Ultimately, the challenges of ongoing biodiversity loss and global change will only be overcome by integrative approaches that reach across different components of the Earth system, e.g. the interactions of the biosphere with the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and anthroposphere. We therefore particularly invite interdisciplinary work at the intersections of macroecology with Earth-system science, geosciences, paleobiology, geography, conservation, and social ecology.
37 Computational Ecology ▶
Full title: Computational Ecology: From Theory to Application
[ Primary Research Area: Methods and approaches ]
Chairs: Lisa Hülsmann, Philipp Porada, Maximilian Pichler, Florian Hartig
Contact: lisa.huelsmann@uni-bayreuth.de
This session invites contributions that advance all aspects of computational methods and models in ecology, from statistical and machine learning approaches (e.g. new R packages, method comparisons) to process-based models (e.g. IBMs, population models). This also includes case studies and applications of computational modelling approaches. We hope that this session will showcase the wide variety of models and methods used in ecology, but also encourage interaction between modellers and applied ecologists. Given the theme of the conference, we would particularly welcome contributions that reflect on measuring, analyzing and predicting biodiversity across taxa, realms and scales. This session is organized by the AK Computational Ecology.
38 Making use of unstructured data streams in ecology ▶
Full title: ID apps, new media and web-based data: A new chapter for biodiversity research?
[ Primary Research Area: Methods and approaches ]
Chairs: Dr. Jana Wäldchen, Dr. Michael Rzanny, Dr. Diana Bowler
Contact: jwald@bgc-jena.mpg.de
Biodiversity research is highly reliant on large amounts of data. Traditional data streams take time to accumulate, and often come with high costs. To increase the spatial and temporal scale of sampling, and therewith supplement knowledge and data gaps in traditional ecological monitoring programs, new sources of data can be tapped: Mobile devices that run species identification apps, websites (online encyclopedias, blogs, forums), social media (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Instagram), and various other internet platforms. On the one hand, these new sources provide an incredible range of data, but with the pitfall that they were not initially captured to support biodiversity research or monitoring. New approaches, methods and concepts are needed to make these data streams accessible and reliably processable for the scientific community. Leveraging new information sources could lead to new insights in research areas such as species distribution modeling, phenology, the recording of invasive species or species interactions. Therefor we would like to bring together experts who have already used digital data from various sources to answer ecological questions or tackled topics like human-nature interactions in the digital realm. We are looking forward to submissions that show how unstructured, unusual or innovative data can contribute to ecological and conservation studies across all taxonomic groups, studies that show methods on mobilizing these data, as well as studies that reveal how to work with and analyze new digital data.
40 Remote Sensing of Biodiversity ▶
Full title: Remote Sensing of Biodiversity
[ Primary Research Area: Methods and approaches ]
Chairs: Feilhauer, Hannes, Antonia Ludwig, Daniel Doktor
Contact: hannes.feilhauer@uni-leipzig.de
Earth observation (EO) data are increasingly used to assess biodiversity and related ecosystem properties. Due to the spatially continuous satellite data availability, EO is therefore also considered a core tool to scale local biodiversity assessments. This is even more important in the light of intensively managed landscapes threatened by biodiversity loss. Related studies make use of various sensors and data to model and map species, functional or ecosystem diversity or to develop indicators of such properties. The employed approaches are manifold and include, for example: artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques as well as physical model inversions which enable the retrieval of leaf and plant traits from spectral data and provide insights in functional diversity aspects. The texture of high resolution imagery is frequently exploited towards information on species or ecosystem diversity. Various approaches aim to develop EO-based indicators of essential biodiversity variables that are designed to provide a comprehensive assessment of biodiversity on different spatial scales. These approaches all have in common that their development is still ongoing research and comprehensive assessments of their capabilities and limits are urgently needed. This session hence aims to give an overview on recent developments in remote sensing of biodiversity and aims to foster the discussion of this topic among interested users. We kindly invite all contributions that rely on remote sensing for spatio-temporal analyses of biodiversity and ecosystem properties across all spatial scales, sensor systems and biomes.
42 Ecological forecasting for decision making ▶
Full title: Ecological forecasting for decision making under global change: Advances and applications
[ Primary Research Area: Methods and approaches ]
Chairs: Owen Petchy
Contact: owen.petchey@ieu.uzh.ch
At a time of rapid global change, answering many of the most pressing questions facing society depends on our ability to anticipate anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Biodiversity underpins ecosystem function, delivering vital services to society, including those essential for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and nature-based solutions. Robust prediction of the effects of global change therefore supports the design of effective strategies to conserve biodiversity and secure the ongoing provision of ecosystem services. Ecological forecasting describes the process of predicting, across different spatial and temporal scales, the state of ecological entities and processes under scenarios of climate, land use and socio-economic change. Ecological forecasts have the potential to inform biodiversity conservation and decision making in a range of contexts, and are highly adaptable to new information. This can allow us to move towards dynamic biodiversity conservation strategies. Here, we aim to highlight recent advances in ecological forecasting enhancing the decision-relevance of such predictions. Advances include interdisciplinary approaches applicable across the full spectra of taxa, realms and scales. The session will also feature the application of ecological forecasts in a range of decision making contexts to demonstrate how ecological forecasting can inform policy and planning to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The session will be chaired by members of the European Ecological Forecasting Initiative, a grass-roots community of researchers, practitioners and policy makers developing ecological forecasts to inform decision making to mitigate the impacts of global change. This session will bring together the European community and accelerate further interdisciplinary, cross-organisational efforts to anticipate anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity.
43 Scales, SARs and SADs ▶
Full title: Scales, biodiversity patterns and heterogeneity in ecology
[ Primary Research Area: Methods and approaches ]
Chairs: Luís Borda-de-Água, Henrique M. Pereira, David Storch, Katrin M. Meyer, Kerstin Wiegand
Contact: lbagua@gmail.com
The species-area relationships (SAR) and species abundance distribution (SAD) are two of the most fundamental descriptions of biodiversity. The former describes how the number of species (species richness) scales as a function of the area, and the latter describes how the relative abundance of species (e.g., the number of individuals) is distributed among species. Importantly, both the SAR and the SAD exhibit characteristic patterns, however, the precise quantitative description of these patterns and the mechanisms generating them remains elusive (and controversial). The goal of this session is to bring together researchers to present and discuss the most recent advances in the study of SARs and SADs with a view to summarizing present knowledge, identifying gaps in our understanding and exploring future lines of research as well as new methodological approaches.
32 Infrastructures and Networks in Biodiversity Research
▶
Full title: Infrastructures and Networks in Biodiversity Research
[ Primary Research Area: Misc ]
Chairs: Christoph Schomburg
Contact: c.schomburg@uni-kassel.de
Scientific infrastructures of Research networks and platforms are an integral component of the scientific landscape, especially within Biodiversity and ecological research. These infrastructures aim to provide users with access to high quality data and to advance both innovations and transfer of knowledge and technologies. Many established infrastructures in the field of Ecology are currently operational, whilst others are in the process of becoming so. The available data within covers all types of environmental domains. From geo-referenced occurrence data and long-time monitoring, as well as those dealing with biodiversity organisation, molecular and historical data.
The National Research Data Infrastructure for Biodiversity (NFDI4Biodiversity) proposes this session to give an overview about several of these infrastructures, the relevant data they work with, the tools they provide for handling and analysing data, as well as other organisations and services they interact and network with. Among these are the NFDI4Biodiversity itself, in which scientific and technical expertise are combined to provide a broad service portfolio for the research with biodiversity and ecological data, the European Long-term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER), with long term monitoring data and its European network, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) with its large datasets and services for publishing and analysis, and the Staatliche Archive Bayerns with its facilities for long-term archiving and interest in difficult to access historical data.
46 Science communication in ecology research ▶
Full title: How can we better communicate our expertise as ecologists? – Talks and panel discussion
[ Primary Research Area: Misc ]
Chairs: Volker Hahn
We want to reflect on and debate the role of ecology researchers in communicating their science, especially when it gets political. We have an ecologist, a journalist and a science communication scientist on the panel. To start, each will give a 15-min presentation titled “How can ecologists better communicate their expertise?”. Afterwards, the panel and the audience will debate the claims made and discuss ways to better communicate our expertise as ecologists.
Panelists:
Prof Dr Katrin Böhning-Gaese, Director of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F)
Andreas Sator, freelance journalist, podcaster and book author
Nils Bienzeisler, Science Communication Researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
Host:
Dr Volker Hahn, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
47 Biodiversity Monitoring ▶
Full title: Novel methodological approaches to biodiversity monitoring
[ Primary Research Area: Monitoring ]
Chairs: Birgit Gemeinholzer
Contact: b.gemeinholzer@uni-kassel.de
Standardized, automated biodiversity monitoring is extremely important in the age of major changes in the geosphere, e.g. due to climate change and land use change. The knowledge gained through biodiversity monitoring helps to sustainably protect nature, is important for the well-being of human life, provides evidence for conservation planning and management at national and international levels, and allows to develop future visions for biodiversity conservation. This session will present scientific research on novel methodological automated and standardized biodiversity monitoring approaches to answer ecologically relevant questions. This partly requires Big Data analyses, for which special computing capacities and tools are provided by appropriate computer infrastructures. In addition to the scientific findings, the long-term availability and re-use of the raw data is also addressed to enable future data re-use.
49 Automated monitoring methods and challenges ▶
Full title: Biodiversity monitoring using digital methods and artificial intelligence: shared challenges and opportunities
[ Primary Research Area: Monitoring ]
Chairs: Michael Beckmann, Patrick Mäder, Christophe Dominik, Anna Cord, Anne Paulus, Sebastian T. Meyer
Contact: michael.beckmann@ufz.de
Until recently, biodiversity had to be (and often still is) monitored by observing, collecting and identifying specimens manually, which is resource- and labour-demanding and has thus limited the available data on the distribution and status of biodiversity. Automated biodiversity monitoring approaches, including visual and acoustic methods, enable unprecedented spatio-temporal coverage, over longer periods of time, with a finer temporal resolution and at several locations simultaneously. Recent boosts in data availability accompanied by substantial progress in machine learning algorithms, notably deep convolutional neural networks, pushed approaches for particular taxa, e.g., plants and birds, to a 'production-ready' state. Automated identification of these taxa can now significantly contribute to biodiversity and conservation research. For other taxa, the development of algorithms and data acquisition devices is ongoing (e.g., camera traps for insects). These techniques, which are increasingly being used across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems, allow ecologists to study novel questions and gain new insights into ecological processes and interactions, but also bring a new set of challenges in terms of data handling, processing, objectivity, transferability, scalability, and AI-based analysis workflows. With this session, we would like to create a platform that brings together researchers using, as well as developing, these technologies. We welcome contributions on all development stages from software and hardware developers to ecologists working in all realms to exchange ideas on shared challenges and opportunities and to showcase results from projects using these novel approaches.
54 PopBio for biodiversity ▶
Full title: Plant population biology: methods, processes and applications
[ Primary Research Area: Plant Ecology ]
Chairs: Solveig Franziska Bucher, Sergey Rosbakh, Tobias Sandner, Sarah Schwieger, Ilka Beil
Contact: solveig.franziska.bucher@uni-jena.de
Population biology forms an important link connecting plant function with community ecology and global patterns of biodiversity. Variations within and among individuals and populations of species are subject to natural selection. These variations are especially of interest in the changing world, where many abiotic and biotic conditions are changing in the wake of global change. By influencing allele frequencies and population growth rates, land use and climate change drive the extinction of rare species and spread of invasives. This session is open to a wide range of topics, including population genetics and epigenetics, variation and plasticity in plant functional traits, rapid evolution, demography and interactions with pathogens, herbivores or pollinators. By bringing together methodological advancements, fundamental research and applied studies, the session will provide new insights into the processes involved in biodiversity change. This session is hosted by the special interest group plant population biology (PopBio). We are looking forward to meeting old and potentially future members, especially students and practitioners, and discuss topics from the wide field of plant population biology.
55 Mapping of plant traits ▶
Full title: Large-scale mapping of plant traits
[ Primary Research Area: Plant Ecology ]
Chairs: Benjamin Dechant, Hannes Feilhauer, Anna Schweiger, Jens Kattge
Contact: benjamin.dechant@idiv.de
Plant traits play an important role for ecosystem functioning and can be used to quantify functional diversity. However, it is challenging to obtain accurate plant trait information across large scales from in-situ data alone due to the effort involved in sampling. Therefore, different strategies to map plant traits across large scales have been pursued, including mechanistic modelling e.g. with dynamic global vegetation models, statistical upscaling of in-situ data and citizen science observations with machine learning, and deriving plant traits from remote sensing using radiative transfer model inversion. In all of these approaches, considerable progress has been made and there is potential for further refinements due to increases in in-situ observations and citizen science data, advances in machine learning algorithms, novel remote sensing data with high spatio-temporal and/or hyperspectral resolution as well as advances in the mechanistic understanding of plant ecophysiology.
Our session invites contributions related to plant trait mapping irrespective of the methods used (statistical, mechanistic, remote-sensing driven or not) and the traits considered (e.g., leaf chemical/morphological traits, canopy structural traits etc.). We welcome theoretical/methodological studies as well as more applied work examining the spatio-temporal patterns of the mapped traits. While our session is ultimately motivated by the need to model and map plant traits globally, studies focused on the steps necessary to achieve this are also relevant, e.g. smaller-scale studies that have implications for global mapping.
56 Plant regeneration traits ▶
Full title: Ecology and evolution of plant regeneration traits
[ Primary Research Area: Plant Ecology ]
Chairs: Christoph Rosche, Lotte Korell, Sergey Rosbakh, Kristin Ludewig
Contact: christoph.rosche@botanik.uni-halle.de
Regeneration from seeds is one of the main determinants of plant population growth and community assembly. The number of successfully established plant individuals is driven by a plethora of abiotic and biotic factors and differs dramatically across populations and species. Much of that large variation may be explained by regeneration traits, i.e., functional traits of the ontogenetic stages of gametophyte production, fertilization, seed maturation, germination, and seedling growth. There has been comparably much research on germination, whereas research on functional traits of pollen, seeds and young seedlings are still relatively scarce. We particularly know little on how these traits, their context-depended functionalities and their interdependencies affect recruitment success under different environmental set-ups. Progress in our understanding of these processes is, however, urgently needed to improve our understanding on how plant communities respond to global change and to develop more sophisticated restoration strategies. Also, knowledge on the eco-evolutionary determinants in inter- and intraspecific variation of regeneration traits may help predicting how populations adapt to their local environment and how this adaptation affects population survival in a changing world. Our session welcomes original research and conceptual frameworks dealing with the ecology and evolution of plant regeneration traits in the broad sense. We envision overcoming knowledge barriers across the earliest ontogenetic stages towards a more comprehensive understanding of the whole seedling recruitment process.
57 Plant carbon allocation in a changing climate ▶
Full title: Carbon allocation in plants and ecosystems under climate change: New insights from experiments and field observations
[ Primary Research Area: Plant Ecology ]
Chairs: Nadine Ruehr, Günter Hoch, Hartmann Henrik
Contact: nadine.ruehr@kit.edu
Climate change affect carbon (C) relations in plants and ecosystems. This is caused by the continuing rise in atmospheric CO2 that alters plant and ecosystem stoichiometry with consequences for plant functioning. In addition, increasing temperatures and drought events decrease C uptake and alter C allocation patterns. Under extreme conditions this can result in disruptions of the plant and ecosystem C balances and may trigger tree mortality. However, plant and ecosystems are also able to acclimate to these new conditions, which might enhance resilience to climate change. Against this background, C allocation processes, including reserve formation, growth and respiration in plants and ecosystems have gained increasing attention in plant ecology. However, our current understanding of the controlling mechanisms and the ecological impact of changes in allocation – particular at the whole-plant to ecosystem level – is still surprisingly patchy. This also involves formation of C reserves and the re-allocation of stored C, as well as defense compounds and the C flux to symbiotic interactions. Moreover, the effect of increases in extreme events such as drought and heat stress, on the whole-plant C balance and on C allocation patterns, as well as the significance of C reserves for stress resistance and resilience of plants and possible acclimation responses are a persisting uncertainty. As a consequence, we cannot predict the C balance of terrestrial ecosystems with confidence, and are limited in our understanding of plant plasticity and possible physiological, anatomical and structural adjustments that may alter ecosystem resilience to climate change. In this session, we aim to provide a platform for exchange of research ideas and novel findings on all aspects of C allocation and storage in plants and ecosystem. In particular, we encourage contributions on quantitative analyses of phloem C transport in plants, C-allocation at the whole-plant and ecosystem level including stress and recovery responses, studies on the ecological significance of C reserves and allocation adjustments for stress resistance and acclimation to new climatic conditions.
58 Water in plants in a changing climate ▶
Full title: Water in plants under climate change â from cells to ecosystems
[ Primary Research Area: Plant Ecology ]
Chairs: Benjamin D. Hafner, Romy Rehschuh, Marco M. Lehmann, Bernhard Schuldt
Contact: benjamin.hafner@tum.de
Water is a key factor determining the structure and function of plants and ecosystems. Questions regarding plant and ecosystem water relations, the impact of water availability on plant growth and ecosystem biogeochemistry as well as impacts of future climatic changes such as increases in frequency and intensity of severe drought and heat events on ecosystem functions remain largely unanswered. This session brings together researchers investigating plant water relations across scales from organs to whole plant, stand and ecosystem level. We invite contributions covering plant hydraulics and processes related to or affected by water uptake via roots and leaves, transport, transpiration as well as their control mechanisms, from both observational studies and experimental manipulations. Modeling studies scaling these processes and novel developments to trace water dynamics in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum are also welcome. This session aims at elucidating structural, functional and physiological responses of plants to their environments spanning from ecophysiological to flux based approaches from different fields. We plan to assemble a group of scientists who are willing to step out of their disciplinary comfort zone and to discuss emergent topics from organ to ecosystem levels in the scope of climate change.
60 Belowground functional diversity ▶
Full title: Belowground functional diversity - the importance of the hidden half for plant and ecosystem functioning
[ Primary Research Area: Soil ]
Chairs: Joana Bergmann, Alexandra Weigelt, Jitka Klimešová, Leonardo Bassi
Contact: joana.bergmann@zalf.de
Ecosystem functioning and service provisioning in the face of climate and biodiversity change is a cornerstone of ecological research. The basis for most of these functions and services is the soil ecosystem and thus literally the ground we are standing on. Soil provides the space and resources for plants to grow. The plant organ directly interacting with soil particles, soil microbial organisms and soil meso- and macrofauna are the roots. Plant roots serve vital functions for plant growth such as water and nutrient uptake, anchorage and storage. A number of different belowground organs further serve the plant's lateral spread, regeneration or multiplication, determining plant life history and functioning in time and space. Yet, plants often show distinct strategies to balance the trade-off between different functions and to optimize local adaptation to environmental conditions. Belowground functional diversity is therefore particularly relevant for ecosystem resilience to different drivers of global change. Belowground bud banks and clonal growth organs for instance are important predictors for persistence against drought and fire in grassy biomes of the Global South (Klimešová et al., 2019; Pausas et al., 2018, Bombo et al., 2022; da Silva et al., 2021; Fidelis et al., 2014). Moreover, rooting depth is an important predictor of persistence following drought as it largely drives the plants access to water (Fan et al., 2017; Tumber-Dávila et al.). Finally, fine root economic traits drive nutrient acquisition and conservation (Bergmann et al., 2020, Weigelt et al. 2021, others) and determine the type and area of surface for plant-soil interactions. Thus, belowground plant functional diversity is central to our understanding of global biodiversity and the conservation of sustained ecosystem functioning. This session aims to foster interactions between ecologists working on different functions of the plant’s hidden half in order to pave the way for a holistic understanding of belowground functional diversity.
62 Phenology across organisms and scales ▶
Full title: Phenological research across scales and organisational levels
[ Primary Research Area: Temporal dynamics ]
Chairs: Robert Rauschkolb, Andrey Malyshev, Jose B. Lanuza, Christine Römermann
Contact: Robert.Rauschkolb@uni-jena.de
“The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” - the dial is shifting. This statement appears in a new light for all scientists investigating the effects of global climate change on our ecosystems. There are numerous examples across the globe that plants and animals shift their phenology in response to these changes influencing also the organisms that rely on them. For instance, these may include plant-pollinator or predator-prey relationships, but also the avoidance of competition through changes in the temporal niches. Consequently, shifts in the phenology of many species can cause the loss or the creation of novel biotic interactions with possible important consequences for their fitness and survival. In order to explore the complex and diverse field of phenological research, this session brings together scientists with different backgrounds and integrates their expertise in phenological research across different spatial and temporal scales and organisational levels. This session will present and discuss the extent to which phenological shifts have already been found in different organisms. Furthermore, the importance of different drivers for observed phenological changes will be addressed. Finally, effects of phenological changes on interactions in ecosystems are to be considered.
63 Land-use changes in the tropics ▶
Full title: Land-use change in the tropics: ecosystem-level impacts and restoration approaches
[ Primary Research Area: Tropical Ecology ]
Chairs: Anton Potapov, Nathaly Guerrero Ramírez
Contact: anton.potapov@idiv.de,
Tropical ecosystems are hotspots of biodiversity, biogeochemical processes, and human-driven land-use changes. Understanding, conserving, and restoring tropical ecosystems is a major sustainability challenge. Therefore, this session will focus on providing an ecosystem perspective on the impact of land-use changes and assessing diverse approaches aiming to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in human-modified tropical ecosystems. The session has a goal to provide an overview of (1) ecological synthesis and modelling studies integrating biodiversity and/or ecosystem functioning changes in human-modified tropical ecosystems across taxa, biodiversity facets, ecosystem compartments, and/or scales; (2) transdisciplinary research including tropical human-nature dynamics; (3) perspectives on sustainable land use and restoration in the tropics. The session welcomes contributions of people working across the tropics, aiming to enhance the communication and build synergies across disciplines and projects. The discussion during and at the end (round table) of the session will work as a basis for an opinion paper summarising the main challenges and avenues towards an ecosystem perspective of human-modified tropical ecosystems.
64 Green infrastructure for biodiverse and healthy cities ▶
Full title: Green infrastructure for biodiverse and healthy cities
[ Primary Research Area: Urban Ecology ]
Chairs: Joan Casanelles Abella, Monika Egerer, Michael Strohbach, Vera Hörmann, Stephan Pauleit, Charles Nilon
Contact: joan.casanelles@wsl.ch
Urban ecology and conservation pitches urban green additions as a silver-bullet solution to biodiversity loss woes. Urban green can provide habitat to increase biodiversity, with potential spillover benefits for reducing climate change impacts, improving stormwater drainage, and overall enhancing the quality of human life. Pocket parks, street trees, urban gardens, green facades and flower strips are some examples of green additions. Indeed, urban ecology and conservation research shows that ‘greening-for-biodiversity’ interventions work: added green can boost biodiversity of plants and animals. Thus, many cities are now piloting greening-for-biodiversity projects in neighborhoods of various socioeconomic status. However, often neglected in scientific discussions and subsequent policy and planning processes are paradoxical social negative outcomes of greening-for-biodiversity projects – one being neighborhood gentrification. As neighborhoods green, they become more attractive, which increases property values and renting prices. This may displace those residents most socially disadvantaged or most vulnerable from their neighborhoods, instead benefiting those who can afford these newly greened neighborhoods. Thus, although urban ecology and conservation tend to praise greening-for-biodiversity projects, we must understand that this is a social-ecological process: in changing the biophysical characteristics of neighborhoods (e.g., planting trees, adding flowers to promote bees), we are changing the social characteristics and the social landscape of neighborhoods. This can influence the social outcomes for urban residents. In this symposium, we invite speakers to present examples from around Europe and the world on the social-ecological nature of greening-for-biodiversity processes and to discuss existing trade-offs and conflicts. We aim for speakers to address this controversy in conservation science and society, and propose solutions on how to maintain and create environmentally just and equitable cityscapes that promote biodiversity conservation and biodiversity’s contribution to all people.
67 People & Nature ▶
Full title: People & Nature
[ Primary Research Area: Urban Ecology ]
Chairs: Aletta Bonn
Contact: aletta.bonn@idiv.de
Resilient urban green infrastructures are an important tool for climate change adaptation, only vital and healthy vegetation can reach its full potential for cooling, shading, filtering and other functions. Trees are particularly important because of their longevity and three-dimensional structure. Evaluating and quantifying these Ecosystem Services became easier due to modelling tools such as iTree or ENVI-met, however, the empirical base of such tools is often limited. In addition, it is not fully understood how Ecosystem Service provisioning will change under stress like extreme weather, pathogens, or defoliation by insects, aspects that are predicted to increase in the future. In this session, we want to explore the latest research concerning the functioning and vitality of urban greenspace, in particular trees, green roofs and green facades. Guiding questions are: How can should we select the planted vegetation in urban areas? How does the design of green infrastructures influence functionality? Which tools can be used to detect stress and declining vitality before plants are irreversibly damaged? Finally, we want to identify research gaps that need to be addressed in the future.
