Investigating the Geodiversity-Functional Diversity relationship in a traditionally managed agricultural landscape in Transylvania, Romania.

Geodiversity, the diversity in the abiotic environment, has been shown to enhance biodiversity and species distribution models across spatial scales. However, there are significant gaps in our understanding of where and for what taxa geodiversity can enhance understanding of ecological patterns and processes. Many previous studies have included species richness as their biodiversity metric, however this offers limited insight into the functioning and assembly of an ecosystem.  

We will address these gaps in literature by investigating how functional trait diversity varies with geodiversity for a range of taxonomic groups (e.g vascular plants, butterflies and birds) in a traditionally managed agricultural landscape in Transylvania, central Romania. Species lists, abundance and land use data has been collected at sampling sites located around villages in the study area. Trait data will be obtained from repositories and geodiversity variables generated using satellite imagery and GIS, with soil and geological maps from secondary sources.