Previous work demonstrated diversity effects on plant community productivity, stability and assembly. The subproject explores the underlying mechanisms. Therefore, we address the long time series of plant performance data provided by the Jena Experiment since 2002 and add further new experimental manipulations and on complementary data about aboveground plant-plant and plant-pathogen interactions. Furthermore, we compare community dynamics assume two underlying assumptions of (a) invasion, (b) no invasion of plants.
Subproject test how community stability is related to change in plant species abundances. Measures will allow us a rich palette of analyses, taking advantage of the sophisticated experimental designs, the long history of measurements and the large number of co-variables available from other subprojects. There are three integral parts in our study, focusing on
- mechanisms of biodiversity effects on productivity and stability and their time course using the long term data sets from the Jena Experiment
- the prediction of community biodiversity and composition from pair-wise species interactions,
- biodiversity effects on community assembly comparing weeded and invaded plant communities of differing plant species richness.
