Functional Diversity of Plant Communities

Eingeladen durch Camilla Wellstein.

Characterizing ecosystems by their biodiversity is increasingly of interest for politicians, nature conservationists, and the public. In ecology we go one step further by searching for reasons for different distributions of species richness, or by analyzing the temporal development of biodiversity patterns under changing environmental conditions. In this talk I will focus on the applicability of different aspects of biodiversity measures in ecological research; beside the presentation of classical diversity indices based on species identity, I will introduce different aspects of functional diversity. Functional diversity indices are increasingly used to describe and to understand changes in community structures along temporal and spatial environmental gradients. In addition to some methodological remarks, I will demonstrate the applicability of various indices describing species and functional diversity to explain ecosystem services, or more specifically changes in biomass production of a grassland ecosystem.

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