ABOVE: Experimental ecosystems at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research allowed researchers to study how invertebrate density influences plant lifecycles and species composition.
JOSEPHINE ULRICH
The paper
J. Ulrich et al., “Invertebrate decline leads to shifts in plant species abundance and phenology,” Front Plant Sci, 11:542125, 2020.
When Josephine Ulrich and colleagues got the chance to work with the iDiv Ecotron, a system of experimental containers in Germany that lets researchers create and manipulate miniature ecosystems, they decided to investigate the effect of declining invertebrate populations on plant communities. Many studies have explored how projected changes in abiotic factors—rising temperatures, for example—influence plants, says Ulrich, a PhD student at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Friedrich Schiller University, but to look at biotic factors such as invertebrate loss is a new approach.
The team used 24 of the Ecotron units to create tiny grasslands, each with the same ...
