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Modelling the biogeochemical cycles and population dynamics
in grasslands to analyse diversity-functioning relationships
People
Christian Wirth, Project P.I.
Jens Schumacher, PostDoc
Tanja Reinhold, Ph.D.-student
Hans Dähring, Technician
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Rationale
The focus of this project is to represent the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in a common modelling framework. This model will serve as a research tool
- to integrate the diverse information assembled in the various subprojects of the first and the proposed second project phase,
- to provide a mechanistically informed expectation of how functional diversity translates into ecosystem processes,
- to understand and predict patterns of coexistence and successional trajectories of species and plant functional types that result from variability in demographic traits and that may influence emergent diversity-functioning patterns and
- to carry out modelling experiments related to long-term dynamics, harvest and climate-sensitivity.
To this end, two state-of-the-art models of soil organic matter and nutrient dynamics (CENTURY) and grassland population dynamics (GEMINI) will be coupled and extended. The vast amount of project data on physiological and morphological traits and the auxiliary soil texture and meteorological data will be used for parameterization and initialization, respectively. The additional experiments (dominance plots, succession plots, replications) are ideal for model testing.
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GERMAN