Project Details
Projekt
[Elementary] Land-use effects on the plant and animal elementome in grasslands and forests
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568582473
Increasing land-use intensity has been shown to alter the taxonomic and functional trait diversity and composition of plant and animal communities. Recent synthesis work from the Biodiversity Exploratories has demonstrated that land-use intensification drives synchronous responses of entire multitrophic communities. These responses involve a shift in functional composition from large, slow-growing organisms to smaller, fast-resource-use organisms across trophic levels. Yet, functional traits of different trophic levels have not been mapped into a common economic spectrum based on their traits, mainly due to the lack of a universal cross-taxon functional trait concept. Placing plants and animals into a shared quantitative trait space would enhance our understanding of how community diversity and composition shift along environmental gradients. We propose that the elemental composition (elementome) of organisms can serve as a universal trait set, as stoichiometry has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding ecological systems. For instance, the fast-slow continuum in life-history strategies leaves a distinct signature in the elementome of plants and animals, with fast-growing species typically exhibiting lower C:nutrient ratios. In this project, we will investigate how the elementome of plants and animals responds to land-use changes in grasslands and forests through three work packages: 1) Linking the elementome to traditional functional traits to relate element concentrations and ratios to the phenotype and function of plants and animals. 2) Assessing the effects of land-use changes on the elementome of plant and animal species and communities in grasslands and forests. 3) Integrating plant and animal elementomes to detect universal responses to land-use changes, quantify elemental imbalances or nutritional mismatches between producers (plants) and consumers (e.g., herbivores), and test whether these imbalances vary with land-use intensity. By bridging plant and animal trait perspectives, our project will provide novel insights into ecological processes mediated by the elementome and reveal the mechanistic drivers of ecosystem function loss, such as declines in productivity, herbivory, and nutrient fluxes across trophic levels, under land-use change.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
Subproject of
SPP 1374:
Biodiversity Exploratories
