BIODEPTH

BIODiversity and Ecological Processes in Terrestrial Herbaceous ecosystems : Experimental manipulation of herbaceous plants communities

co-ordinator :J.H. Lawton

BIODEPTH is a pan-European study of the importance of biodiversity for the functioning of grassland ecosystems. It features the same field manipulation experiment replicated across a continental network of sites.

The BIODEPTH objectives are:

• To establish a network of European field sites in natural and semi-natural herbaceous plant communities along two gradients, from NW to SE (Ireland to Greece) and from NE to SW (Sweden to Portugal).
• To establish a common experiment that mimics world- and European-wide loss of biodiversity by creating replicate plant communities with reduced species-richness, from the pool of native species present at each site.
• To determine and quantify the effects of reduced biodiversity on key ecosystem processes and structural characteristics at each site.
• To clarify the role of plant ecological, rather than taxonomic, diversity in maintaining ecosystem processes, e.g. by evaluating the use of functional groups and guild concepts.
• To develop theoretical model linking biodiversity, functional groups, population biology and ecosystem processes.
• To establish the rates at which depauperate communities are reinvaded by experimentally excluded species, and/or the rates at which species are lost from more diverse communities.
• To improve the capacity of ecologists to predict the consequences of loss of biodiversity for ecosystem processes from local to landscape-level scales.

contact :

Professor J.H. Lawton
NERC Center for Population Biology
Imperial College at silwood Park,
Ascot, Berkshire
United Kingdom
Tel : 44 01 344 294 346
j.lawton@ic.ac.uk

web site :