Seminar: Susanne Tautenhahn

I will present a novel plant-based approach for environmental sensing—mobile crowd sensing of environments (MCSE)—in which crowd-sensed plant observations serve as living indicators of local climate, soil, and disturbance, informed by established ecological indicator values. I start with an analysis of urban Europe based on more than 80 million crowd-sensed plant observations from 326 cities. Treating plants as living environmental sensors reveals fine-scale patterns of urban climate and soil conditions beyond the urban heat island, including contrasts in moisture, light, soil pH, salinity, and disturbance. These sharp within-city gradients are comparable in magnitude to differences observed between cities thousands of kilometers apart. Built-up areas are highly homogeneous across Europe, whereas urban forests preserve important environmental diversity and ecosystem functions. Second, I introduce FloraFlux, a community-driven initiative that enables species-level plant observations within eddy covariance tower footprints worldwide via the Flora Incognita app. Observations are linked to plant functional traits from the TRY database and pan-European bio-indicator systems for climate, soil, and disturbance, providing analysis-ready data to explore the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Initial analyses reveal strong relationships between maximum net ecosystem productivity and plant-based indicators of soil nitrogen and functional traits. Together, these studies demonstrate how crowd-sensed plant observations can integrate high-resolution environmental and trait information and generate a functionally relevant biodiversity layer for ecosystem research.