Vegetation relevés were carried out at five of the Terrestrial Environmental Observatories (TERENO) project (www.tereno.net) sites were mown or grazed grasslands were available. The initial study design was for investigating the impact of land management (mown meadows versus grazed pastures) on plant diversity and spatial scale heterogeneity. The selected grasslands were managed as either meadows or pastures for at least the last ten years. The initial study design was a balanced, nested design with three grasslands per land management type and study site. Vegetation relevés of 10 m x 10 m were established within identified grasslands from which 10 subplots, of 1 m^2, were randomly selected to be surveyed. Within each subplot all vascular plant species were determined and their cover was visually estimated to the nearest percentage as a proxy for abundance. Data is provided as percentage cover per subplot. Plant species names were updated according to The Plant List. Due to in-field limitations and more detailed records from farmers, the final data set consists of 270 subplot records, of which 120 are within meadows and 150 within pastures. The sampling inbalance should be accounted for (see associated publication for further details, and the supplementary plot combination file). Two complementary data sets were also collected at the same plots (with the same spatial resolution) for soil microbial diversity of fungi and bacteria. These data sets have been deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under the accession PRJNA563995.
Das ist eine senseBox der Humboldt Explorers. Weitere Informationen unter www.humboldt-explorers.de
Das ist eine senseBox der Humboldt Explorers. Weitere Informationen unter www.humboldt-explorers.de
Das ist eine senseBox der Humboldt Explorers. Weitere Informationen unter www.humboldt-explorers.de
Das ist eine senseBox der Humboldt Explorers. Weitere Informationen unter www.humboldt-explorers.de
Das ist eine senseBox der Humboldt Explorers. Weitere Informationen unter: www.Humboldt-Explorers.de
The impacts of climate change pose one of the main challenges for agriculture in Central Europe. In particular, an increase of extreme and compound extreme climate events is expected to strongly impact economic revenues and the provision of ecosystem services by agroecosystems. A highly relevant, still open question is how grassland farming systems can cope best with these climate risks to adapt to climate change. A prominently discussed economic instrument to relieve income risks is the formal insurance, but natural and social insurances are newly under discussion as well. Natural insurances include specific grassland management practises such as maintaining species-rich grasslands. Social insurances, in our terminology, comprise all forms of societal support for farmers’ climate risk management. This includes in particular arrangements of community-supported agriculture that reduce income risks for farmers, or payments for ecosystem services if their design takes risk into account. Formal, natural and social insurances may be substitutes or complements, and affect farmer behaviour in different ways. Thus, policy support for any of the three forms of insurance will have effects on the others, which need to be understood. InsuranceGrass takes an innovative interdisciplinary view and assesses formal, natural and social insurances: on how to cope best with impacts of climate extremes on grasslands, integrating social and natural sciences perspectives and feedbacks between them. Based on this holistic analysis, InsuranceGrass will provide recommendations for policy and insurance design to ensure effective risk-coping of farmers and to enhance sustainable grassland farming, considering economic, environmental and social aspects. Impacts of extreme and compound extreme events on the provision of ecosystem services (e.g. magnitude and quality of yield, climate regulation via carbon sequestration, plant diversity) by permanent grasslands in Germany and Switzerland are quantified based on long-term observations and field experiments. Cutting-edge model-based approaches will be based on behavioural theories and empirically calibrated. With the help of social-ecological modelling, InsuranceGrass explicitly incorporates feedbacks between farmers’ and households’ decision, grassland management options, and ecosystem service provision in a dynamic manner. The contributions of different insurance types are developed, discussed and evaluated jointly with different groups of stakeholders (i.e., farmers, insurance companies, public administration). A scientifically sound and holistic assessment of the role of formal, natural, and social insurances for the sustainability of grassland farming under extreme events requires both disciplinary excellence and seamless interdisciplinary collaboration. InsuranceGrass brings together four groups from Zürich and Leipzig, with unique disciplinary expertise and a track record of successful collaboration.
The soil fauna affects soil structure, nutrient mineralization, decomposition processes, and the activity and composition of the microbial community in soil. These effects likely also modify plant performance, plant competition and the use of plant tissue by above-ground herbivores. The proposed project investigates effects of earthworms and soil insects on the above-ground system in grassland communities of different diversity. Earthworm and soil insect density is manipulated in experimental plots differing in plant diversity. The manipulations include the combined exclusion of below-ground insects and above-ground herbivores. It is expected that the response of the above-ground plant and animal community to manipulations of soil animal populations depends on plant species, plant diversity and plant functional group. The differential response is expected to propagate into the herbivore system thereby affecting the structure of the above-ground animal community.
Es ist postuliert worden, dass invasive Pflanzenarten, die sowohl die Struktur als auch die Funktionen von Ökosystemen beeinflussen, besonders erfolgreich sind und einen großen Einfluss auf die Zusammensetzung von Lebensgemeinschaften und damit auf die Biodiversität ausüben. Es gibt jedoch bislang nicht viele empirische Untersuchungen, die sich umfassend mit dieser Thematik befassen. Daher soll im Rahmen dieses Projektes am Beispiel der Staudenlupine (Lupinus polyphyllus) der Einfluss dieser erfolgreichen invasiven Art auf die funktionelle Diversität von Pflanzen in Bergwiesensytemen in der Rhön untersucht werden.
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
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