Prof. Christian Wirth awarded Max Planck Fellowship at MPI-BGC

The Max Planck Society (MPG) has recognized the outstanding scientific achievements of Leipzig biologist Prof. Dr. Christian Wirth and his excellent collaboration with scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, by awarding him the prestigious Max Planck Fellow Program. In January 2013, Wirth, Managing Director of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle-Jena-Leipzig and Professor of Functional Biodiversity Research at the University of Leipzig, began an in-depth collaboration with the Jena Max Planck Institute in the highly endowed funding program.

“With the MPG resources from this program, we want to promote the further development and scientific evaluation of the global biodiversity database for functional plant traits (TRY) and at the same time establish it as an important data platform of the iDiv consortium,” says Wirth. Since its launch in July 2011, TRY has been the world's largest database for plant traits and is coordinated at the MPI-BGC in Jena. To further develop TRY, the biodiversity researcher Wirth will in future head a working group entitled “Functional Biogeography” together with Dr. Jens Kattge from the Max Planck Institute in Jena.

Work on the TRY database (www.try-db.org) was started in Wirth's former Max Planck junior research group in Jena at the beginning of 2007. “I am particularly pleased that the MPG continues to reward our perseverance. The name TRY is not an acronym, but really means “trial”. At the time, we never dared to hope that we would now be able to make more than three million entries from around a quarter of all known plant species - approximately 100,000 - available for functional biodiversity research. Now, with the help of MPG funding, it is time to harvest the scientific fruits,” says Wirth.

TRY brings together a broad spectrum of plant trait research from over 200 international suppliers. Traits on the key processes of growth, dissemination, establishment and stress tolerance were summarized. There are now over 150 research applications using TRY data. Among the applicants are ecologists and evolutionary researchers as well as conservationists and climate modelers. “TRY provides a view of the global plant phenome, i.e. the entire spectrum of plant form and function on our planet - from the tropical forest to the tundra,” says Wirth. “We are particularly interested in how this functional diversity is distributed on the land surface and how it affects the Earth's environmental system. That's why we are working with earth system modelers at the MPI-BGC who are investigating the interactions of plants with their environment and the climate. Our joint work shows that The better and more completely we describe the diversity of vegetation, the more accurate these predictions will be.”

The TRY project is also a sociological experiment that has led many researchers to share their valuable data. Zoologists, mycologists and microbiologists are now also interested in the concept of the TRY initiative. “We hope to provide the impetus for information on the functional diversity of all groups of organisms to become available soon.” The next step is to link up with other databases on plant distribution, vegetation composition, climate and soil. This will make TRY an increasingly important data basis for the global analysis of biodiversity, which is also being pursued at the German Center for integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle-Jena-Leipzig, as well as its interactions with the entire Earth system.

Background Information:
The Max Planck Fellow Programme promotes collaboration between Max Planck Institutes and outstanding university lecturers. The prestigious and highly remunerated funding is generally limited to a period of five years and is also linked to the management of a small working group at a Max Planck Institute.

The Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena researches the cycles of essential elements, in particular carbon, and their interactions between the biosphere, the atmosphere, the geosphere and the oceans. The research work aims to record the material cycles and their significance for the climate system on a global scale and for large time scales. Physicists, meteorologists, geologists, chemists, biologists and mathematicians work very closely together due to the diversity of the subject area. The institute was founded in 1997. For more information see www.bgc-jena.mpg.de.