EXClAvE II – Morphological and physiological land use responses of plant (and bacterial) communities in a common garden, a field experiment, and in the greenhouse

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In the last phase of the Biodiversity Exploratories, both the large-scale field experiments and the common garden EXClAvE have been established to quantify the relative effects of individual components of land use (mowing and fertilizer additions) and their combinations on the diversity and functionality of ecosystems. To track morphological and physiological responses of communities, we established digital whole-community phenotyping using a plant scanner (PlantEye F500, Phenospex, Heerlen, The Netherlands) that captures plant communities in 3D and adds multispectral information to the 3D information. We found that plant communities show short-term responses in morphological and physiological properties to land use treatments, but not in species composition. In the proposed project, I will a) track the temporal trajectory of community responses to experimental land-use treatments; b) compare morphological and physiological responses of plant communities in the common garden and in the REX / LUX experiments to generate general rules of community responses to land use changes; and c) to perform a greenhouse experiment to track responses in plant morphology, physiology, and microbiome to experimental land use treatments in four selected species to estimate how interspecific variation in responses contributes to community-wide effects. Therefore, the proposed project builds upon data of the Biodiversity Exploratories and EXClAvE, provides new data to the Biodiversity Exploratories, stands alone as a novel contribution to the question on how land use affects ecosystems, and will contribute to a mechanistic understanding of community responses to land use components.