Projects

Worldwide, grasslands form important ecosystems, providing essential habitats to a wide variety of species. However, these ecosystems experience various pressures, such as climate change and plant invasion, potentially affecting their functioning and thus jeopardizing the services and benefits they provide to humanity. Grassland conservation and restoration initiatives are thus important, and various policy frameworks have been ...

Basic research in model species like Arabidopsis thaliana has significantly increased our molecular understanding of plant growth and development during the last decade. Translating information about functional traits to crops with increased genome complexity is not trivial. Here, we propose an integrative systems biology approach to enhance the accurate delineation of functional networks in plants.

Understanding how human-induced vegetation shifts modify N cycling is essential. In this study, land use patches under different land management will be characterized according to their plant functional diversity. Living plant effects on gross N cycling and microbial community structure will be determined. Links between plant functional diversity and biogeochemical ecosystem functioning will be investigated.

This PhD project employs an ecosystems biology approach to unravel important processes within natural plankton communities, including turnover dynamics, spatiotemporal functions, mutualistic and antagonistic interactions, and the relationship between biodiversity and functional diversity. High-throughput sequencing, specifically metatranscriptomics, is utilized to describe plankton communities, employing both long- and short-read sequencing ...

Exotic species invasion has been recognized to be among the major causes of global biodiversity loss. Surprisingly, however, only little systematic research has been performed so far on the effects of species invasion on ecosystem functioning. We currently do not know when invasive species can be expected to cause ecosystem changes, and which ecological processes are triggering these changes. Ecosystem functions are believed to be effectuated ...