Element cycles in forests and grasslands of the Biodiversity Exploratories: Response to management intensity and associated biodiversity

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The regulation of water and nutrient cycling are two out of four main groups of ecosystem services, which are strongly influenced by land management and additionally controlled by biodiversity and organism community composition. Land use and biodiversity are frequently related and intensification of land use is regarded as the most important of five major threats to biodiversity. BECycles will continue the long-term observation of the cycling of water, C, N, P, H+, and base metals on all VIP plots of the Biodiversity Exploratories. Element budgets will be evaluated by element fluxes in rainfall, throughfall, stemflow, soil solutions and additionally in aboveground litterfall in biweekly resolution. In addition to element balancing, we aim at improving process understanding of cycling of N as well as dissolved and particulate organic matter (DOM, POM) with the help of sophisticated analytical methods. These include natural abundance stable isotope determinations, molecular characterization of dissolved organic matter, chemical and microbial characterization of the phyllosphere microflora, particle-size determination of POM, and combinations of microcalorimetry and laboratory mineralization experiments of soil and soil solution. The combination of results gained by the application of these methods with Bayesian modelling will enable us to relate ecosystem services and functioning like C and N cycling and nutrient use efficiency to land-use intensity and biodiversity. By including available abiotic plot properties and land-use measures in models (structural equation, Bayesian, and pedotransfer functions) we further aim at extrapolating element cycling and budgets from the VIP to the EP level.