Colloquium: Christian Wirth

The MPI-BGC is a center of global functional biodiversity research. It hosts the TRY database, is a member of iDiv, and has demonstrated through many innovative experiments, large-scale observations, and modeling approaches that biological diversity has a decisive influence on the Earth system and is a key factor in understanding the impacts of climate change.

In my short presentation, I would like to take a look at the future of trait-based functional biodiversity research. Which approaches have been successful? What new opportunities arise from AI? Which new experiments and observations do we need in order to understand the role of plant biodiversity in the Earth system and to make it usable for modeling?