Upscaling the "Biodiversity - Ecosystem functioning paradigm" through Remote Sensing.

The hypothesis that greater species diversity leads to greater stability of ecosystem functioning (the diversitystability paradigm) has been a point of debate for half a century, and is -in the light of the current biodiversity crisis- one of the most challenging research topics in ecology. Evidence for the paradigm largely comes from small scaled in situ and ex situ experiments where plant species richness is manipulated and ecosystem response is monitored through time. The general objective of this proposal is to upscale existing knowledge in time and space using satellite imagery, and to determine how plant and plant trait diversity affect the stability of ecosystem functioning. Three frequently used measures of ecosystem stability - variance, and resistance and resilience to extreme climatic events will be derived from MODIS remote sensing data. Study systems are broadleaved forests and semi natural grasslands throughout Northern Europe. We will use existing vegetation surveys to quantify plant species richness and plant trait diversity. The more specific research objectives are to (1) Derive key ecosystem properties related to stability of ecosystem functioning from Remote Sensing (RS) imagery; (2) Optimize RS techniques to quantify variance, resistance and resilience of ecosystem properties; (3) Evaluate the performance of a suite of continuous functional plant diversity measures in explaining the stability of ecosystem functioning and; (4) Acquire insight in the mechanisms behind ecosystem stability.

Keywords:Biodiversity, Functional traits, MODIS, Plant trait diversity

Disciplines:Plant biology