Spatiotemporally explicit incidence analysis of plant functional groups in meta-communities (EuroDIVERSITY 040)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Kleyer
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: from 2006 to 2010
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 20497534

In community formation, the assembly of entering species and extant species can take different directions, depending on the functional traits of the interacting species, the size of the landscape species pool, and on dispersal of multiple interacting species in a metacommunity on the landscape scale. The interplay between trait composition of extant communities, traits of entering species and spatiotemporal metacommunity configuration needs to be understood for predicting functional biodiversity. The proposal addresses this issue in the context of the EURODIVERSITY CRP ASSEMBLE. (A) The temporal axis of community assembly will be understood from time series analysis where species dynamics are explained by functional trait combinations. (B) The spatial axis of community assembly will be understood from incidence analysis of plants in a metacommunity, explained by the spatiotemporal arrangement of local communities. Patches of an urban ruderal metacommunity with different degrees of fragmentation will be mapped in the field. For all species of the target metacommunity, logistic regression models predict spatially explicit plant species incidences in relation to site fertility and disturbance and thus provide the patch ¿ matrix structure for each species of the metacommunity. Spatially explicit statistical modelling requires to record species incidences in predicted habitats around a target communities during several years. Colonisation / extinction events of each species will be fitted with distance, patch size and trait composition of resident communities as explanatory variables in logistic regression. These results will be used to analyse functional traits of all responsive species. (C) Individual analyses of ASSEMBLE project partners will be synthesised to find general assembly processes across ecological differences in various European landscapes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants