Das Projekt "Mutualisms between bees and crops in tropical agroecosystems in Mexico" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Institut für Biologie , Mikrobiologie durchgeführt. Pollinators are a vital help in keeping acceptable levels of crop production worldwide (Klein 2007, etc.). However, their rapid loss (Biesmeijer 2007, etc.) is currently becoming one of the biggest concerns for food safety and environment conservation. This situation has led a group of scientists (most of them leading the present initiative) to initiate investigations on this matter in the ALARM and the Bee Shop projects inside the EU's FP6, mainly on pollinators from Europe, but with an appendix on bees from the neotropics. But since tropical diversity of pollinators remains largely unknown, this context drives the present project to propose the first large-scale study on pollinating bees in Mexico, drivers of their population dynamics and maintenance of the ecosystem services they provide in the form of pollination. is one of the countries where bee diversity and economic use are highly linked. On one side, it is the third largest Apis mellifera honey exporter, which means a great socio-economic impact of honey production. On the other side, its southern part belongs to one of the world's 25 great biodiversity hot-spots, thus implying a large diversity of native bees that pollinate crops and wild plants, hence contributing both to the food production and to the conservation of plant biodiversity. Unfortunately, increasing land use and deforestation probably lead to a loss of pollinating bees, undermining their diversity and potential benefits for crops production and conservation of biodiversity. The aim of our project is therefore to investigate the links between landscape, biodiversity of bees and their impact on crop production in the southern tropical Mexican areas of Yucatan and Chiapas, in order to target jointly on poverty reduction by sustainable production of food and conservation of biodiversity.
Das Projekt "Plant-pollinator networks in agro-ecosystems" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Zoologisches Forschungsmuseum Alexander König - Leibniz-Institut für Biodiversität der Tiere durchgeführt. Pollination is crucial for maintaining angiosperm biodiversity and represents one of the most important ecosystem services. With the increasing threats of massive insect decline, studying pollination and associated networks has become more important than ever. However, studying plant-pollinator interactions at a species level with morphological methodologies is time-consuming, expensive, and depends on exceptional taxonomic expertise. In this study, we target the plant-pollinator networks of two important crops (caraway and apple) using a combination of traditional methods with DNA barcoding and metabarcoding. With this approach, we can identify potential dipteran and hymenopteran pollinators and - from their pollen load's their associated plant species. This project is a collaboration between the ZFMK and the Agroecology and Organic Farming Group (INRES) at the University of Bonn and part of GBOL II.
Das Projekt "The organisation of ecological networks in time and space" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Universität Freiburg, Institut für Biologie II durchgeführt. Current global changes put pressure on natural communities. Understanding how these communities are organized in time and space is crucial to predict how they will react to more variable meteorological conditions, increased temperature, or fragmentation of habitats. We will tackle the question of the organization, functioning, and evolution of communities by considering the trophic (who eats whom) and non-trophic (e.g., pollination, nest provisioning...) relations between species, thus considering communities as interaction networks. A 'large-scale' and a 'small-scale' system will be studied. The former consists of sown wildflower strips in agroecosystems, the latter of urn-like leaves (pitchers) of Sarracenia purpurea, a North American plant species introduced in Europe and inhabiting bogs. The ecological networks in the wildflower strips will be used to test several models of community organization and notably how the spatial arrangement of communities influences their composition and structure (metacommunity models). The small size of pitchers allows recording the evolution of the abundances of the species inhabiting the leaves, notably with molecular techniques for bacteria. The network in pitchers will be used in two lines of research: firstly, we will manipulate the presence/absence of key species (e.g., top predators) and of environmental conditions (e.g., temperature) and follow the dynamical response of the communities. Secondly, we will perform reciprocal transplant experiments to explore the question of 'local adaptation' at a network level.
Das Projekt "Biodiversity and associated ecosystem services in small vs. large scale agriculture" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Universität Göttingen, Department für Nutzpflanzenwissenschaften, Abteilung Agrarökologie durchgeführt. Biodiversity conservation cannot rely on protected areas alone, as sustainable conservation requires strategies for managing whole landscapes including agricultural areas. Organic farming in Germany may contribute strongly to the protection of biodiversity and to sustainability of agriculture through enhancing ecosystem services. However, the effectiveness of this agri-environmental management is highly dependent on landscape structure. The main objective of this study is to compare the effectiveness of organic cereal management in small vs. large scale agriculture through measure of the diversity of plants and arthropods and associated ecosystem services, such as seed predation, insect predation, aphid parasitism and pollination. Pairs of organic and conventional winter wheat fields will be selected in small vs. large scale agricultural landscapes along the former inner German border, i.e. in West vs. East Germany. This study design enables a unique experiment, where it would be possible to disentangle the effects of landscape composition and configuration heterogeneities in the same study region and to study how these affect the effectiveness of organic management. The detailed analyses of the expected valuable data could provide significant results (published in high ranked, international scientific journals), and contribute to the development of the existing
Das Projekt "Sub project: Core Projekt 9 - Monitoring of aboveground arthropod diversity with main emphasis on xylobionts" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Universität Würzburg, Theodor-Boveri-Institut für Biowissenschaften, Biozentrum durchgeführt. Arthropods are highly diverse and essentially involved in numerous biological processes. Tree crowns provide habitats for a large part of this diversity, but are still a vastly uncharted territory. The major aim of this project is to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the influence of forest management on the diversity and functional roles of canopy arthropods. For this we 1) perform a thorough recording of the diversity of canopy arthropods. Based on data of several years we analyse the structure, dynamics and guild composition of tree specific arthropod communities in forests under different management regimes. 2) We experimentally accumulate dead wood - a rare key resource in managed forests - in individual trees and on the ground and analyse the effects on the populations of xylobionts and their interaction with other guilds (e.g. predator-prey relationships), 3) we investigate (also experimentally and in cooperation with other projects) the importance of xylobiontic arthropods for coarse woody debris decomposition. The repeated monitoring of canopy arthropod diversity by means of insecticidal knock down allows an estimation of stability and resilience of species-rich communities. Our project provides important data for other projects, allowing relating canopy diversity with that of other habitats and communities with the aim to achieve a more comprehensive modelling of forest ecosystem processes. Our previous work has shown that increasing land-use intensity in grasslands leads to changes in pollinator composition (more dipterans, fewer bees) and also affects plants where land use winners (e.g. fly-pollinated Heracleum sphondylium and Ranunculus acris) and losers can be distinguished. We currently investigate whether this translates into lower pollination of selected losers (e.g. bee-pollinated Lotus or Campanula), and higher pollination of winners. Such processes will accelerate the success and decline of plant populations in intensively used grasslands. Long-term monitoring of these processes is applied for here.
Das Projekt "WP 2.5: Conservation and management of ecosystem functions at multiple spatial scales" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Theodor-Boveri-Institut für Biowissenschaften, Biozentrum, Lehrstuhl für Zoologie III (Tierökologie und Tropenbiologie) durchgeführt. Objectives: To review the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on biotic interactions (pollination, seed dispersal, parasitism, predation) and ecosystem functions at different spatial scales; To understand the impact of policy-driven local and landscape-wide management schemes on biotic interactions and ecosystem functioning and the contribution of conservation areas to ecosystem services; To compile interaction webs along gradients of habitat fragmentation and land use intensification; To assess the functional resilience and biological thresholds of biodiversity loss at multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Das Projekt "A final step of speciation? - Changes in flowering time and their genetic and ecological background within three closely related diploid Hordeum species from Patagonia" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung durchgeführt. When species come into secondary contact after allopatric speciation, geneflow could either result in merging of the lineages or hybrids with reduced fitness in comparison to the parental species occur, which means resources (gametes) are wasted by hybridizing individuals. The evolution of crossing barriers counters hybridization. In Hordeum three diploid perennial species evolved in allopatry but are now sympatrically distributed in Patagonia. Within this project the evolution of prezygotic isolation through changes in flowering time among the three species will be analyzed. We expect to find staggered, short flowering in stands with multiple species, while in stands build by single species flowering should last over a longer time period. This will prevent/reduce cross pollination in sympatric populations. These differences must be reflected by the allelic composition of the flowering time loci in the genomes of the species. In sympatric populations we expect to find few genetic variation at the flowering time loci in species and clear differences in allele composition among species, while genetic diversity in allopatric populations should be higher. Through association studies in common garden experiments and analyses of three flowering time genes in natural populations we will test these hypotheses. In addition this study will provide first information on flowering time genes in perennial grasses of the economical important wheat tribe Triticeae.
Das Projekt "Teilprojekt: Die Verbindung zwischen genetischer Diversität und Artendiversität: Muster und Prozesse in Grünlandpflanzen (GenLink)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung GmbH - UFZ, Department Biozönoseforschung durchgeführt. Species diversity (SD) and genetic diversity (GD) are fundamental levels of biodiversity that span from genes to ecosystems. Thus, sustainable management and land use must target both, SD and GD. However, the two have mostly been studied independently, despite a number of potential connections. We propose to analyze patterns and processes linking SD and GD in European cultural grassland ecosystems within the framework of the biodiversity exploratories. We focus on molecular markers and neutral processes like gene flow and drift which allow to analyze historic and current processes at the landscape level. First, in a multi-site and multi-species approach we analyze correlation patterns between species diversity of grassland sites and genetic diversity at neutral molecular markers (AFLP) of nine grassland species from three functional groups. We hypothesize that positive correlations between species and genetic diversity depend on colonization/extinction and gene-flow/drift equilibria. Thus, we expect to find such correlations for species with low to intermediate dispersal capacity. Second, we relate landscape structure and land use intensity to genetic diversity in the same nine grassland species within a GIS platform. Using a landscape genetics approach we thus identify landscape features, both current and historic, that are critical for the maintenance of GD and SD. We hypothesize that historic habitat continuity is more important than current landscape structure for both SD and GD. Third, we investigate the outcome of a process that directly links SD and GD via pollination facilitation. We test whether pollination and seed set of, and gene flow among experimental low density target plants is facilitated by resident species diversity of pollinator-dependent plant species. We hypothesize that pollination facilitation exists but depends on the pollinator specificity of the plant pollination syndrome.
Das Projekt "Integration of remote sensing techniques and information on ecosystem services to measure tropical forest degradation - A case study from the tropical rain forest of Ecuador" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Universität Freiburg, Institut für Geo- und Umweltnaturwissenschaften, Professur für Landespflege durchgeführt. Forest degradation is a serious problem, particularly in developing countries. It affects the social, cultural, and ecological functions of forests, and it is a silent killer of sustainable development. Also, forest degradation is one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions although its significance has not been estimated on a global scale. In Ecuador degradation is one of the greatest direct threats to biodiversity and forests in the country affecting the ecosystem services provision. The country has approximately 10 million hectares of forest and 6 million hectares are located in the Amazon Basin region. Numerous ecosystem services derived from the region such as pollination and flood control may also appear in larger spatial scales, extending over complex landscapes and whole watershed. This study will analyse forest degradation in tropical rain forest of Ecuador. This zone has one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity within the world s tropical forests. The objective of this study is to integrate remote sensing techniques and information on ecosystem services to measure tropical forest degradation in the rain tropical forest. The specific objectives are (a) to measure the structural aspects of forest degradation by RS methods and (b) to relate structural forest degradation to the provision of ecosystem services by interviews. The results will be used to produce several scientific publications (e.g. SARs potential to assess and assessment of ecosystem services provision in the study area). Also results will be an input to some local strategies in favour of conservation carried out in Ecuador.
Das Projekt "Auswirkungen von Klima und Landnutzung auf die Diversität und Funktion von Bestäubern, Zersetzern und Herbivoren" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Theodor-Boveri-Institut für Biowissenschaften, Biozentrum, Lehrstuhl für Zoologie III (Tierökologie und Tropenbiologie) durchgeführt. SP7 analyses two important ecosystem processes: pollination and decomposition. Species richness and abundance of pollinators sampled with coloured UV-reflecting pan traps will be related to floral diversity (SP4, SP5), vegetation type, altitude and climate (SP1 to SP3). Plant-pollinator interaction webs will be quantified to estimate specialization and connectance in relation to climatic variables (SP1), land use and biodiversity (SP4, SP5, SP8). Fruit and seed set of five abundant flowering plant species will be measured for open, hand-pollinated and exclosure treatments to evaluate pollinator limitation in relation to climate, land use and biodiversity. Transplant and pollination experiments with an endemic and a wide-spread Impatiens species will be performed to analyse the importance of pollinator-mediated gene flow (SP4). From combined litter and soil samples the meso- and macrofauna will be extracted. Furthermore the epigaeic fauna is sampled using pitfall traps. Identification to morphospecies, measuring of body size and DNA-barcoding will be applied to estimate biodiversity and size structure (SP 8). Diversity, abundance and size structure of soil fauna taxa will be related to floral diversity, climate, land use, biogeochemical processes (SP1-3) and aboveground diversity (SP4-8). Decomposition rates and the contribution of size classes of decomposers will be measured using litter bags differing in mesh size. Experiments with litter mixtures will be performed to test for adaptations of decomposers to local conditions as well as the effect of litter diversity on decomposition rates along altitudinal gradients.