ExploreStab: effects of land use and climate change on the stability of plant communities and its underlying mechanisms

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Maria Májeková
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568724360

The temporal stability of plant communities is of paramount importance for maintaining multiple ecosystem functions over time, such as ecosystem productivity or carbon sequestration. However, the relevance of different ecological mechanisms proposed to maintain the stability of plant communities remains one of the most debated long-standing questions in both basic and applied ecology. The urgent need to understand the underlying stabilizing mechanisms of plant communities is nowadays further reinforced by the predictions of increased temporal weather variability and occurrence of extreme climatic events (ECE) under climate change. However, little is known about the possible interactive effects of land use and climate change on stability, its underlying mechanisms and the ecosystem functions it provides. ExploreStab will study the ecological mechanisms of plant community temporal stability. ExploreStab will integrate and synthesize the extensive datasets on long-term plant abundances (19 years in 300 EPs of grasslands and forest understory vegetation), relevant above- and below-ground functional traits, land-use, and ECE using novel quantitative methods developed by the applicant and her collaborators. WP1 will address the question of to what extent the ecological mechanisms (dominance effect, asynchrony, and portfolio effect) drive community temporal stability. WP2 will zoom in on one of the mechanisms - the asynchrony of species fluctuations, addressing the knowledge gap of the so-far hidden internal community dynamics and the role the species functional dissimilarities play in determining it. WP3 will evaluate the potential complex effects of land use and climate change on community stability and its underlying mechanisms. The anticipated outcomes could help inform research-based nature conservation and identify important knowledge gaps for further research under future climate change.

• DFG Programme: Infrastructure Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1374: Biodiversity Exploratories