Water Cycle

A new study shows that future ecosystem functioning will increasingly depend on water availability. Using recent simulations from climate models, an international team of scientists found several “hot spot regions” where increasing water limitation strongly affects ecosystems. These include Central Europe, the Amazon, and western Russia. mehr

The efficiency of plants to use water and take up carbon dioxide for growth critically depends on the availability of nitrogen, phosphorus and their balance in the ecosystem. In a recent study, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and their Spanish partners analyzed how plants and their environment respond to the addition of these nutrients. mehr

The Earth's Critical Zone is the thin, living, and permeable layer that connects the atmosphere with the geosphere. The Collaborative Research Centre 1076 aims at increasing our understanding of the links between surface and subsurface. mehr

Lichens and mosses are rather inconspicuous plants. They grow on rocks, walls or tree trunks. Researchers of the University of Potsdam, the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena and the American Georgia Southern University have now discovered that these organisms absorb a significant part of the precipitation, which then evaporates directly back into the atmosphere. In doing so, lichens and mosses not only contribute decisively to the global water cycle, but also have a cooling effect on the regional temperature of the land surface. The results of the study have just been published in the journal Nature Geoscience. mehr

Forests fulfil numerous important functions, and do so particularly well if they are rich in different species of trees. This is the result of a new study. In addition, forest managers do not have to decide on the provision of solely one service – such as wood production or nature conservation – as a second study demonstrates: several services provided by forest ecosystems can be improved at the same time. Both studies were led by scientists from Leipzig University and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), and published in the prestigious journal Ecology Letters. mehr