Overview

A total of 13 research groups will be closely collaborating in the second phase of the biodiversity project in order to assess ecosystem level effects of biodiversity. The particular strength of this group is the complementarity of the approaches chosen. All projects will contribute to the five major goals of the Forschergruppe:

• to investigate the relation between plant diversity and total species diversity,
• to test the relation between carbon storage and diversity,
• to test the extent to which plant diversity contributes to closed element cycles,
• to identify which components of diversity control C-storage and element cycles,
• to identify which factors contribute to the stability of plant communities.

A full quantification of the most important element cycles as well as a coordinated investigation of above-ground and below-ground processes has not been carried out in this type of experiment before. Five of the 10 subproject will explicitly focus on soil organisms and processes in the soil. Furthermore, most groups will not only quantify the responses of major components of biodiversity in grasslands (bacteria, fungi, invertebrates) but also carry out manipulation experiments which are nested in the overall plant diversity design in order to quantify specific effects of these components on ecosystem processes.

The Forschergruppe is a collaborative research effort of the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, the Max-Planck-Institutes for Biogeochemistry and Chemical Ecology, also in Jena, the Humboldt-University Berlin, the FU Berlin, the Darmstadt University of Technology, the University of Goettingen, the University of Leipzig, the University of Potsdam, the ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich.