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EXClAvE – Land use effects on plant and microbe communities: an experimental common garden Approach

The upcoming phase of the Biodiversity Exploratories is dedicated to the establishment of experimental approaches specifically testing the effects of land use intensity on ecosystems. Common garden experiments are used to reduce environmental heterogeneity to a minimum focusing on the effects of treatments. We are proposing to transplant grass sods harvested at n = 42 plots of the Biodiversity Exploratories to a common garden where they will be subjected to four land use treatments manipulating the intensity of mowing and fertilization. In the following three to 15 years, responses of plant and bacteria communities to treatments will be tracked. The composition and diversity of plants and bacteria (next-generation 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing) will be assessed. Additionally, using an automated plant phenotyping system (PlantEye F500, Phenospex, Heerlen, The Netherlands), which captures plant communities in 3D and adds multispectral information to the 3D information, we will calculate several parameters that characterize whole plant communities. Changes in the plant and bacterial composition and diversity will be related to the land use history of each of the plots. We are expecting communities originating from different plots but treated in the same way to converge in composition and diversity, whereas sods harvested in the same plot but subjected to different treatments to diverge. The proposed project takes advantage of the prior knowledge of the plot-specific information on land use intensity and species composition, provides new data to the Biodiversity Exploratories, and also stands alone as a novel contribution to the question on how land use affects ecosystems.

http://www.biodiversity-exploratories.de/

Team: Verena Zieschank