PLANT COMMUNITIES UNDER GLOBAL CHANGES - Niv DeMalach, Institute of Plant Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Rehovot Campus)

.Please join us for our next Monday departmental seminar on the 25th of April from 15:00 to 16:00 at the Porter Auditorium

https://tau-ac-il.zoom.us/j/83229921170

PLANT COMMUNITIES UNDER GLOBAL CHANGES

Niv DeMalach, Institute of Plant Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Rehovot Campus)

.Natural plant communities are threatened by global land use and climate changes. I will discuss three recent projects aiming to quantify the consequences on different scales

This first project is motivated by increased resource availability in natural systems due to land-use changes, e.g., the use of fertilizers in agriculture and nitrogen emissions. Using a meta-analysis of 600 experiments worldwide, we tested the consequences of increasing the availability of plants’ primary resources: N, P, K, and water on species richness

The second project investigates plant communities’ stability in a long-term study, testing whether they can be stabilized by the “soil seed bank” (the seeds in the soil that can stay dormant for years). We compared the dynamics of the aboveground vegetation and the soil seed bank in different sites varying in climate

Lastly, I will discuss the effects of climate on plant life forms. Plants are often classified into annuals, perennial herbs, and woody species. Using data from ~2 million observations, including most plant species on earth, we built a world map showing the proportion of each lifeform. These days we are analyzing the effects of different climatic variables (e.g., precipitation, temperature) on these groups