| Head: |
Dr. Winfried Voigt |
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Address:
Tel: Fax: |
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
0049-(0)3641-949-414 0049-(0)3641-949-402 |
Our general research interest is the analysis of complex spatio-temporal patterns in communities and the understanding of the causes of these processes such as ecological succession, complexity and stability of communities and responses to environmental changes. Based on many years of experience in processing large datasets, we analyze extensive long-term data bases (plants and invertebrates) from different grassland ecosystems, mainly xerothermic grasslands and do manipulative experiments in artificial grasslands, as well.
Currently, we focus on finding and applying appropriate functional groups of different trophic levels to various issues in community ecology: functional aspects of biodiversity, effects of climate change, changing land use and industrial pollution on grassland ecosystems. Using functional groups, we can perform ecosystem/community analyses and comparisons on a more general level rather than on species compositions while retaining detailed species information. Based on such functional groups, we found that sensitivity to climatic changes increases with trophic rank. This may lead to ecosystem destabilization under climate change by disrupting trophic relationships.
We also developed in 2004 a method to construct interaction webs based on functional groups and used this approach to investigate trophic and non-trophic interactions and their consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in both near-natural and in manipulative grassland experiments (Jena Experiment). Here we could show that the complexity of such interaction networks is much lower in disturbed (industrially polluted) than in undisturbed grasslands. Another topic we focus on is the exact quantification and separation of effects various herbivore groups have on specific plant biomass or plant cover values in grasslands.
The research work in our group is characterized by extensive field work (collection of plant and animal data, manipulative experiments, measuring of environmental factors) but also by intensive and exacting data analyses and statistical modelling (multivariate statistics, geostatistics, SEM, GIS etc).
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