How do forest disturbance, post-disturbance succession and temperature variability affect #moth and #butterfly diversity? Led by Imran Khaliq, we fitted 20,000 species distribution models to #CitizenScience data from across Germany and predicted responses: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Ready to start your own lab? Interested in #GlobalChange,#Biodiversity and #Ecosystem#Resilience? Join us in Göttingen - we are looking for a (female) Junior Research Group Leader in #EcologicalNovelty.
Attractive conditions, see euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/415857 - please share widely if you can!
New lecture on #citizenscience and #biodiversity this winter semester in Göttingen!
Open to students, but also the general public (exam for students only though😉). Most talks in German. Great line-up of speakers!
Come work with us! #PhD position on #ecosystem and #biodiversity effects of large #herbivores on the Eurasian steppes now announced: www.euraxess.de/jobs/395512
Nice combination of fieldwork and meta-analysis, co-supervised by @jonastrepel.bsky.social and ejlundgren.github.io
(All images from Astental, Großglockner Area, Carinthia, Austria, taken in 2024 and during last week - but situation similar in other parts of the Alps.)
The future of the hay meadows will depend on the willingness of the coming generations to continue to hard work - and on sufficient funding to make the systems economically viable for the land users. I am impressed by the young families keeping up the mowing here, but it's not easy.
Alternatively, former hay meadows are now grazed, and stocking densities are often so high that few flowering plants are seen.
At the same time, where possible (and we are speaking of altitudes around 2000 m a.s.l. already), more and more livestock owners apply slurry as fertilizer (greener areas - mown earlier). This leads to the disappearance of many plant and butterfly species.
Of course, a few species also benefit, such as this Lilium martagon, but mainly in early stages of abandonment.
At my current location in a pretty remote valley in Austria, abandonment, but also intensification, have kicked in again since ca. 2017. Abandoned hay meadows quickly lose they herb-rich appearance, and grasses soon dominate (often described in the literature). And yes, these slopes are steep!
I had assumed that some of these extremely biodiverse hay meadows ("Bergmähder") would persist in the long run. But speaking to the people who do the hard work, this seems less and less guaranteed.
These meadows had been maintained for centuries as #social-ecological systems, but were #abandoned and #intensified over large areas in the 1950s-1980s. However, due to tradition and conservation funding, unfertilized areas managed at low intensity still exist - biodiversity hotspots.
They also host a very high insect diversity and abundance, due to their high plant species richness and floral resources.
Mountain hay meadows of the Alps are impressive.
There is currently a lot of debate about #grazing vs. #mowing for #biodiversity - often polarized, with grazing seen as the holy grail and mowing as detrimental. I have long felt that it's not so much about one or the other, but about intensity and system. Well, here is another example:
Update on a new project on revitalizing coppice in Germany, from the Plieninger Lab ⬇️ I'm really looking forward to results from this one.
necessarily transferable.
plus: a lot of cattle dung is collected anyway by the villagers for heating and cooking, so is busted permanently into the atmosphere. I think it's very difficult to speculate here about livestock and carbon sequestration without any data at hand, and insight from other grassland systems is not....
Dung decays very slowly in this climate, and dung beetle densities are pretty low, so a lot of old dung actually burns (but again, there is little dung where it burns - for the reasons we outline in the paper).
well, plant-originating C has always been transported belowground by the numerous small mammals, but the area of high fire intensity does hardly overlap with the distribution of black soils (rather Kastanozems and Solonets/Solonchak soils there).
#Bird #surveys: Do we need to rewrite our methodological standards?
#PassiveAcousticMonitoring suggests that expert-based recommendations might lead to under-recording, due to diurnal and seasonal mismatches.
New paper led by David Singer; with 25,000 h audio data: link.springer.com/article/10.1...
(e.g. of Stipa bunchgrasses) is accumulated belowground and therefore difficult to extract, iii) the C balance depends on grazing intensity and grazer type (e.g. horses vs. cattle), which have been so dynamic recently. I guess this will be studied eventually, but it's not so easy.
...combined livestock and fire effects on climate is difficult, because i) we don't know much about the fire-related C balance (how much C is emitted, how much returns to the system as "black carbon", e.g. soot, ash), ii) measuring C in steppe vegetation is difficult, because so much biomass...
Note that we don't say (and know) anything about the climate effects of livestock here. The main message of the paper is that livestock grazing controls fire fuel availability (but of course it's more complex, e.g. drought and precipitation have also in impact on fire patterns). Looking into....
See also this new review of the evidence: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1... - quite fascinating stuff.
Thanks a lot!
What does 136:46, NFG and NFY mean?
#Fieldwork update from our PyroDiv project (uni-goettingen.de/en/690609.html): A Kazakh-German field team is now collecting data on the Great Steppe to reveal the impact of fire legacies and grazing on biodiversity. Great collab between @acbk.bsky.social @consbiogoe.bsky.social and @uni-muenster.de.
Ganz so einfach ist es nicht, es gibt viele Gründe für Landnutzungsaufgabe - und resultierende Bestandsentwicklungen von Arten sind auch lange nicht immer negativ. Hier der dem o.a. feature zugrundeliegende Artikel: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Long, exciting feature in @science.org today on land #abandonment, #rewilding and biodiversity by
@dancharles.bsky.social, covering our abandonment research across Europe and Kazakhstan. Based on interviews with Gergana and Johannes + site visit in Bulgaria. Free to read: bsky.app/profile/scie...