EVENT - Auswirkungen von extremen Wetterereignissen (Dürre, Starkregen, Frostwechsel) und Biodiversität auf Ökosystemfunktionen

EVENT

Intensification of weather extremes is currently emerging as one of the most important aspects of Climate Change. Surprisingly, the significance of extreme events for vegetation dynamics and ecological processes still is underrated, although their effects are obvious and out of proportion compared to their short duration of occurrence. Some work is done already concerning changes in mean temperature or mean CO2-level. However, we propose that extreme events are even more important for vegetation response.

Therefore we have installed a field experiment in 2005 at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where we experimentally apply expected extreme events like drought, intense rain and more numerous freeze-thaw cycles to different plant communities. Together with different control treatments this experiment gives us a powerful tool to evaluate the effects of extreme climatic events. As communities might vary in their stability against extreme events, grassland and dwarf-shrub communities have been chosen to evaluate systems differing in their longevity and productivity. Within the systems we compare the performance with one (only grasses in grassland and only dwarf-shrubs in heath) and two functional groups (grasses and herbs in grassland and dwarf shrubs and grasses in heath) to address the importance of functional group performance for buffering against extremes

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