Seminar: Ulisse Gomarasca

Our understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is still limited by the difficulty in simultaneously retrieving biodiversity and ecosystem functions at scales beyond small measurement plots and repeatedly in time. Throughout my PhD project, I leveraged fine-scale remote sensing data from Sentinel 2 to estimate biodiversity at eddy covariance sites across the globe. From eddy covariance measurements I derived ecosystem functions and metrics of multifunctionality (that is, the simultaneous provision of multiple ecosystem functions) and related all derived metrics to a remotely-sensed heterogeneity metric as proxy of plant diversity (Rao Q index). I found that Rao Q is an important predictor of single ecosystem functions and multifunctionality, hinting at a positive effect of biodiversity on the functioning of ecosystems. Surprisingly, Rao Q was generally more important than mean site climate and comparable to the structural components of the ecosystem in predicting ecosystem functions and multifunctionality. Capitalizing on recent and future advances in the remote sensing of both diversity and ecosystem functional properties, my studies pave the way to the spatially and temporally continuous characterization of the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship at the landscape, regional, and global scale.