Main Research

• Within the DFG research unit ICON we will investigate the effect of shifting from continuously flooded rice cropping to crop rotation (including non-flooded systems) and diversified crops on the soil fauna communities and associated ecosystem functions. Groups with a major impact on soil functions will be identified and their response to changing management regimes as well as their recolonization capability after crop rotation will be quantified. Microcosm experiments covering a broader range of environmental conditions expected under future climate conditions will be set up to determine the compositional and functional robustness of major components of the local soil fauna. Advanced statistical modeling for quantification of species – environment relationships integrating all data subsets will specify the impact of crop diversification in rice agro-ecosystems on soil biota and on the related ecosystem services.
• We are partners of the EU FP7 project SOILSERVICE. This project combines interdisciplinary empirical studies and soil biodiversity surveys to construct soil food web models and determine effects of changing soil biodiversity on stability and resilience of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycling, as well as assess consequences for outbreaks of pests or invasive species. Major objectives are (1) to value soil ecosystem services during different pressure of land use and changes in soil biodiversity, (2) to establish methods for determining and predicting sustainability of ecosystem services at different types of land use, and (3) to build scenarios for identifying economical and social drivers of how land use such as biofuels production and land abandonment can influence soil biodiversity and ecosystem services over European scale.
• Within the context of the DFG project SOILFOODWEB, which is part of the Priority Program ‘Biodiversity Exploratories’, we study the impact of land-use intensity and landscape structure on the biodiversity and functioning of soil food webs. The community structure of soil biota in terms of species diversity, functional diversity, body size and abundance distributions is compared between the three Exploratories (i.e. ecoregions), two contrasting ecosystems (grassland and forest) and two opposite land-use intensities (intensive and extensive) under consideration of landscape structure (heterogeneous to homogeneous). Complementing laboratory studies aim at identifying key components of soil food webs that may alter below- and aboveground processes differently in the two studied ecosystems (forest/grassland). Starting from March 2011, the project will be continued with a slightly different focus under the acronym SOILFUN.
• The BMBF project BIOPLEX (incl. coordination of the BIOLOG Europe Program), focused on biodiversity and spatial complexity in agricultural landscapes under global change (coordinator 2000 to 2010: Wolters). Within this project we have used a multiscale approach to study the impact of landscape structure on the diversity and function of soil invertebrates. Research on these issues is currently continued based on university funds, but we are intensively working on proposals for follow up projects.