BEGenDiv – A multispecies genetic diversity baseline for the Biodiversity Exploratories

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Oliver Bossdorf; Dr. Walter Durka; Professorin Dr. Katrin Heer; Dr. Stefan Michalski; Professor Dr. Lars Opgenoorth; Dr. Jill Sekely; Privatdozent Dr. Henri A. Thomassen
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems ; Plant Genetics and Genomics ; Ecology of Land Use
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569065110

Genetic diversity is an important level of biodiversity that remains underrepresented in biodiversity research, and in the Biodiversity Exploratories. Answering big, general questions about genetic diversity, and its links to environment and other levels of biodiversity, however, requires large-scale standardized genetic surveys of many species -. which are still extremely rare - and the aggregation of data across species. In the Biodiversity Exploratories, most previous genetic projects have focused on single or few species, and they always remained restricted to subsets of EPs. As a result, genetic diversity has so far been absent from large syntheses. We propose to close this gap, and to make the Biodiversity Exploratories a model project for multi-species genetic diversity analyses, and a laboratory for developing and testing across-species metrics of genetic diversity. Specifically, we propose to sequence the 30 most abundant tree and shrub species across all forest EPs, and the 10 most locally abundant grasses and forbs in each grassland EP. Across all 300 EPs, this will involve samples from over 100 plant species, and >9000 samples that will be genotyped through whole-genome or reduced-representation sequencing. We will use the resulting multi-species SNP data to (1) test the impacts of land-use intensification, habitat heterogeneity, and other drivers, on genetic alpha and beta diversity across many species, (2) evaluate the usefulness of effective population size as a universal genetic diversity indicator, (3) explore how the answers to the previous questions depend on the species’ life-history traits and other characteristics, and finally (4) develop and test across-species metrics of genetic diversity, and apply these to the new multi-species data obtained in our project. Our project will provide the first standardized multi-species survey of plant genetic diversity for all experimental forest and grassland plots in the Biodiversity Exploratories. It will not only provide general answers to key questions about plant genetic diversity, but also create an important data set for future syntheses, and a solid baseline for genetic monitoring.

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