Fellowship Group Functional Biogeography

at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

Overview

We explore plant functional diversity and its role in biogeochemical cycles: how it is affected by climate variation and environmental changes and how it affects vegetation responses.

For this purpose, we host the TRY Plant Trait Database and we closely collaborate with iDiv, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research.

The group is a collaboration of Max Planck Fellow Christian Wirth and the three Departments at the Max Planck Institute to facilitate a continuation of the TRY database.

News and Activities

Summer 2022
The group contributes to organizing a session on 'Functional diversity in space and time: measurements, models and experiments to advance trait-based ecology' at the World Biodiversity Forum, June 26 - July 1, 2022. more

Spring 2022
The group contributes to organizing a session on 'Plant traits, adaptation and biogeochemical cycles – from measurements to models' at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union, April 3-8, 2022. more

Spring 2020
Version 5 of the TRY Plant Trait Database has been released and the new reference publication published: Kattge, J., Bönisch, G., Díaz, S., Lavorel, S., Prentice, I. C., Leadley, P., Tautenhahn, S., Werner, G., et al. (2020) TRY plant trait database - enhanced coverage and open access. Global Change Biology, 26(1), 119-188 doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14904. Currently we are working on Version 6 of the TRY Database.

Recent Publications

Joswig, J.S., Wirth, C., Schuman, M.C., Kattge, J., Reu, B., Wright, I. J., Sippel, S., Rüger, N., et al. (2022) Climatic and soil factors explain the two-dimensional spectrum of global plant trait variation. Nature Ecology and Evolution doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01616-8

Butler, E. E., Wythers, K. R., Flores-Moreno, H., Chen, M., Datta, A., Ricciuto, D. M., Atkin, O. K., Kattge, J., Thornton, P. E., Banerjee, A., Reich, P. B. (2021). Updated respiration routines alter spatio-temporal patterns of carbon cycling in a global land surface model. Environmental Research Letters, 16(10): 104015. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac2528

Freiberg, M., Winter, M., Gentile, A., Zizka, A., Muellner-Riehl, A. N., Weigelt, A., Wirth, C. (2021). A new and improved online catalogue of all extant vascular plant names available. Taxon, 70(1), 223-223. doi:doi:10.1002/tax.12441

Guerrero-Ramirez, N., Mommer, L., Freschet, G. T., Iversen, C. M., McCormack, M. L., Kattge, J., et al. (2021). Global Root Traits (GRooT) Database. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 30(1), 25-37. doi:10.1101/2020.05.17.095851

Laughlin, D. C., Mommer, L., Sabatini, F. M., Bruelheide, H., Kuyper, T. W., McCormack, M. L., Bergmann, J., Freschet, G. T., et al. (2021). Root traits explain plant species distributions along climatic gradients yet challenge the nature of ecological trade-offs. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5, 1123-1134. doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01471-7

Migliavacca, M., Musavi, T., Mahecha, M. D., Nelson, J. A., Knauer, J., Baldocchi, D. D., Perez-Priego, O., et al. (2021). The three major axes of terrestrial ecosystem function. Nature, 598, 468-472. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03939-9. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03939-9

>> Complete list of publications