ILEE Lunch Seminar 21/5

Invited guest speaker

Speaker

  Yann Hautier (Institute of Environmental Biology, Biology Department, Utrecht University)
Grassland biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the Anthropocene
Despite much scientific effort, the capacity of plant diversity to buffer ecosystem functioning against future climate change remains unclear. This knowledge gap makes it difficult to quantify and predict the cascading impact of current biodiversity loss on the stable provisioning of essential ecosystem services that contribute to human wellbeing. I present recent evidence of the buffering capacity of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning under climate change and identify new directions for research. This includes consideration of theoretical, experimental, and observational studies examining individual and crossed effects of direct and indirect manipulation of both biodiversity and climate change. I present a novel large-scale experiment towards this end – UU-BioCliVE – to be part of the Dutch and international ecological research infrastructure. UU-BioCliVE is designed to uncover the fundamental mechanisms by which grassland ecosystems are impacted by future precipitation scenarios and how biodiversity itself may buffer ecosystems against potentially negative impacts of seasonal and punctuated changes in climate extremes. This includes asynchronous species responses to climatic fluctuations, the complexity and topology of trophic interaction networks, and key grassland ecosystem engineers, i.e. plants and litter-feeding bioturbating earthworms. This integrated approach will provide the necessary knowledge base for future management strategies.

Please order your sandwich before Monday 20th, 18h!!
carolin.mayer@unamur.be

Sandwich list here

Note: Due to the ILEE Teambuilding Day on Tuesday 4/6, the next ILEE lunch seminar will be on Tuesday, 11th of June 2019!