Plant community assembly and biodiversity: a spatio-temporal perspective
type: CreativeWork
description: Biodiversity, the variety of life at all organisational levels from genes to ecosystems, affects ecosystem processes and therefore the goods and services ecosystems provide. More research is needed to provide new insights into biodiversity changes and the processes that drive these changes, in order to formulate effective policy and conservation measures to stop the ongoing biodiversity loss. In this thesis, I focus on spatial and temporal changes in different aspects of plant biodiversity and examine the driving forces that generate and maintain observed biodiversity patterns. Multiple facets of biodiversity (taxonomic, phylogenetic, functional) were characterized in semi-natural grasslands (in plots of 0.5 × 0.5 and 2 × 2 m, and whole grassland polygons). The extent to which the present-day and historical characteristics of the sites and their surrounding landscape explain the current diversity patterns was quantified. Temporal changes in the multiple facets of diversity, and assembly processes that drive these changes, were investigated along a more than 300 year long chronosequence representing an arable to semi-natural grassland succession. Both grassland plant species richness and functional trait diversity in grassland sites were to a large extent explained by the land use history of the sites and the availability of grassland habitat in the surrounding historical landscape. It appears that not only is there a delayed loss of species diversity in response to landscape fragmentation ("extinction debt") but that there is also a delayed decline of functional diversity in response to ongoing habitat destruction (i.e. a "functioning debt") that will potentially generate a time lag in the changes in ecosystem attributes. Quantification of the linkages between the distribution and diversity of dispersal and persistence traits and current and historical properties of the grassland sites and their surrounding landscape revealed that long-distance dispersal potential a…
abstract: Biodiversity, the variety of life at all organisational levels from genes to ecosystems, affects ecosystem processes and therefore the goods and services ecosystems provide. More research is needed to provide new insights into biodiversity changes and the processes that drive these changes, in order to formulate effective policy and conservation measures to stop the ongoing biodiversity loss. In this thesis, I focus on spatial and temporal changes in different aspects of plant biodiversity and examine the driving forces that generate and maintain observed biodiversity patterns. Multiple facets of biodiversity (taxonomic, phylogenetic, functional) were characterized in semi-natural grasslands (in plots of 0.5 × 0.5 and 2 × 2 m, and whole grassland polygons). The extent to which the present-day and historical characteristics of the sites and their surrounding landscape explain the current diversity patterns was quantified. Temporal changes in the multiple facets of diversity, and assembly processes that drive these changes, were investigated along a more than 300 year long chronosequence representing an arable to semi-natural grassland succession. Both grassland plant species richness and functional trait diversity in grassland sites were to a large extent explained by the land use history of the sites and the availability of grassland habitat in the surrounding historical landscape. It appears that not only is there a delayed loss of species diversity in response to landscape fragmentation ("extinction debt") but that there is also a delayed decline of functional diversity in response to ongoing habitat destruction (i.e. a "functioning debt") that will potentially generate a time lag in the changes in ecosystem attributes. Quantification of the linkages between the distribution and diversity of dispersal and persistence traits and current and historical properties of the grassland sites and their surrounding landscape revealed that long-distance dispersal potential a…
author: Purschke, Oliver
language: eng
keywords: Ecology (including Biodiversity Conservation), Physical Geography, phylogenetic diversity, null model, life-history traits, land use history, landscape fragmentation, dispersal, functional diversity, semi-natural grasslands
date published: 2011
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:00:02Z
provider: University of Lund
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, Lund University