Tage der Biodiversität 2027

Rapidly intensifying environmental pressures caused by human activities (i.e. land use change, climate change, biological invasions, pollution and over-exploitation) are increasingly altering the distribution and abundance of species as well as the composition and richness of communities. These pressures often interact synergistically, while operating across contrasting spatial and temporal scales, with climate change being spatially rather homogeneous and unidirectional over time, whereas land-use change is often spatially heterogeneous and variable through time.

Attribution approaches that link observed responses in complex systems, such as climatic extreme events, to their underlying drivers are well established in climate change science. In global change biology, however, methods for attributing biodiversity responses to individual and multiple pressures have rarely been implemented.

In this upcoming project, historical vegetation plots will be resurveyed across nutrient-rich mesic, semi-dry and wet grasslands in Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and the Czech Republic, representing countries with contrasting agricultural and land use histories. Standardized vegetation surveys will be linked with spatially explicit land use data derived from historical maps and contemporary satellite imagery, together with proxies for climate change, nitrogen deposition, and invasion pressure. This research will examine the impact of both historical and current pressures on plant diversity and species composition. Furthermore, it will assess the magnitude and duration of time lags in plant-community responses to changing pressures. This will result in an improved understanding of which anthropogenic pressures drive changes in grassland plant diversity and their temporal legacies.