Senior Scientist Group
Functional Ecology and Global Change
Human actions globally jeopardise ecosystems. We investigate how human impacts and anthropogenic climate change modify biodiversity, ecological processes and ecosystem functions. Our research primarily aims to disentangle the causes and functional consequences of biodiversity loss. The results of our research are used to develop models of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning under future scenarios.
Our work covers three main research fields: plant-animal interactions, experimental plant ecology, and trait-based models. Most of our research is centred on plant-animal interactions, which are important for the stability of ecological communities as well as for ecosystem functions, such as pollination, seed dispersal, and plant regeneration. This work ranges from analyses of intraspecific variation in biotic interactions to analyses of ecological networks at community level.
We work in a variety of ecosystems, ranging from the tropics (e.g., the Andes and Mount Kilimanjaro) over the subtropics (e.g., South African Fynbos) to temperate systems (e.g., the Alps). In our research, we combine observational and experimental approaches with comprehensive collections of functional traits from natural-history collections. Our empirical studies feed into meta-analyses and simulations at large spatial and temporal scales.
