Winning a Paper Prize wasn’t actually on my 2026 bucket list, but I’d be more than happy to receive it 😁

Vier Personen führen in einem Wald in Italien eine Probenentnahme durch. Eine Person steht auf einer Leiter und greift in die Bäume, zwei weitere arbeiten am Boden mit Stangen, eine weitere Person beobachtet. Der Waldboden ist mit Ästen bedeckt, die Bäume tragen dichtes grünes Laub.

Peter Dietrich (links) und Doktorand Michael Köhler stehen im Labor.

Kleine Organismen, große Wirkung? MLU-Biologe @drpeterdietrich.bsky.social erforscht Mikroorganismen in & auf Bäumen. 🌳 Mit Hilfe modernster Sequenzierungstechnik will er verstehen, wie sich z. B. der Klimawandel auf die Gemeinschaft dieser Organismen auswirkt & welche Folgen das hat. mlu.de/bcjf6

New season, new experiment. This week we are at IDENT Freiburg to collect leaf and bark samples. 🌲🌳🪾 The team includes @alex-sternberg.bsky.social and Sophia, who will use these samples for their doctoral theses (microbiome and secondary metabolites). @michakoehlerbotany.bsky.social

Here is the link for the newsletter in English: www.ufz.de/export/data/...

What actually lives in green roof substrate? Curious about what we, the "Biodiversity" team, is studying on the UFZ green roof (and other green roofs in Leipzig/Halle)? Check out the latest UFZ Green Roof Newsletter for all the details: www.ufz.de/export/data/...
@ufz.de @unihalle.bsky.social

🚨 Postdoc paper alert! 🚨
🌳✨ In a subtropical forest plantation (BEF-China), we asked: How flexible are tree leaves when light & neighbours change? Using Vis/NIR spectroscopy, we measured 14 leaf traits from ~5000 leaves 🌿 across diversity levels. doi.org/10.1002/ecy....

Foliar Endophytic Fungal Communities Are Driven by Leaf Traits—Evidence From a Temperate Tree Diversity Experiment Our study demonstrates that functional leaf traits play a crucial role in shaping fungal endophyte richness and community composition, even beyond the effects of tree species identity. Traits associa...

🚨 Doctoral Student Paper Alert 🚨
🌿🍄 What shapes fungal endophyte diversity inside tree leaves? We found that leaf traits, both their average values and variation within a single tree, strongly influence foliar fungal endophyte communities. doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

Research green roof in Leipzig, Germany Due to the progressing climate change, cities face the challenge of adapting to new weather conditions, including heavy rains and draught periods. Gre…

You're interested in urban biodiversity and green spaces? You live in or near Leipzig? There's a great green roof research facility at the @ufz.de. You can find all the important information in our new article: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#greenroof #urban #biodiversity

Five months later, our trees have grown well, so we have finally planted them in our tubes. Stay tuned to see how our trees grow and resist pollution. @treedi.bsky.social

Happy that one of this year's 23 doctoral students is one of us. We will be investigating whether more diverse forests can defend themselves better?! (research on the effects of tree diversity on secondary metabolites in Germany and globally). Stay tuned 🥳

Excited to see our paper now published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social ! 🎉
doi.org/10.1111/2041...

All in the name of science — even if it means crawling through the undergrowth! Together with @alex-sternberg.bsky.social (PhD student 👌) and an amazing team of helpers, we’re currently sampling at the IDENT site in Sardinia. Stay tuned for more updates! 🌲🌲🦠🍄‍🟫🪱🌲🌳

Linking plant diversity–productivity relationships to plant functional traits of dominant species and changes in soil properties in 15‐year‐old experimental grasslands We sampled 15-year-old plant communities of a biodiversity experiment (Jena Experiment) and tested whether and how changes in plant functional traits and soil properties over time and along the plant....

Fun achievement today: the unofficial fifth chapter of my PhD thesis is among the top 10% of most-read papers in @ecol-evol.bsky.social in 2023. It's great to know that the things one does are of interest to others!
doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

Last week was an outstanding one for us: Lina submitted her PhD thesis and Pablo @castretis.bsky.social defended his thesis excellently. This was the first PhD defence in our beautifully renovated lecture hall in the Botanical Garden. Congratulations to you both! You did a fantastic job! 🥳🎉🥂

This week we identified fungal fruiting bodies from the #MyDiv tree diversity experiment, and found an impressive richness. One of our highlights is Dissoderma odoratum growing as a parasite on a Hebeloma mesophaeum fruiting body. Very rare and endangered! Nature is an incredible thing! #MLU

Yes, I would love to!

Preprint alert!🚨 You want biomass data without clipping the vegetation? Use your smartphone for a 3D scan! In our manuscript you get instructions & a complete Jupyter notebook for immediate use! doi.org/10.32942/X2T... 🪴+📱=💚 #biodiversity #ecology #globalchange #photogrammetry

Plant diversity and community age stabilize ecosystem multifunctionality Biodiversity and community age are known to stabilize ecosystem functioning, but this knowledge is almost exclusively based on analyses of single ecosystem functions. Here, we tested whether biodiver...

Biodiversity stabilizes productivity. Check ☑️ Biodiversity also increases ecosystem multifunctionality. Check ☑️ But does biodiversity also increase the stability of multifunctionality? Spoiler: yes! Our study in Global Change Biology: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...