The importance of forest ecosystems
The world´s forests store large amounts of carbon and play a central role for mitigating climate change through taking up substantial amounts of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. While research has focused mainly on carbon sequestration, carbon release remains poorly understood. Herein, decomposition of wood represents an important process since deadwood stores about 8% of the world´s forest carbon.
Moreover, forest ecosystems host a large share of the Earth´s biodiversity. Arthropods and microbes are the most species rich groups and they are of high functional importance as decomposers of deadwood and other types of organic matters. Yet, global biodiversity patterns of these taxa and the mechanisms driving them remain incompletely understood.
Around
of global forest
carbon is stored
in deadwood.
Forests under change
Forest ecosystems around the world undergo massive changes. A major driver of these is climate change since temperature and precipitation are interactively driving ecosystem processes, including wood decomposition, and largely determine the distribution of species and thus biodiversity patterns.
In addition, anthropogenic pressure on forest resources is altering forest ecosystems. Deforestation, especially in the tropics, is causing dramatic habitat and biodiversity loss. But even if the extent of the forest area is not changing, structural and compositional differences between natural and managed forests are causing changes in biological communities and often declines in biodiversity. Moreover, forest-use related changes in tree species composition and forest structure can affect decomposition processes and carbon stocks.
Despite the high importance of forest ecosystems for global biodiversity and carbon cycling, it remains yet unknown how climate and forest use interactively shape biodiversity – particularly of decomposers – and decomposition processes across forest ecosystems. This limits the ability to model the future of the global forest carbon sink as well as of forest policy and management to counteract biodiversity decline.
Objectives of BIOCOMP
The overall objective of BIOCOMP is to better understand how climate and forest use shape decomposer biodiversity, wood decomposition rates and carbon release from deadwood. This is achieved by a combination of studies at different scales:
Module 1
This module studies the interactive effects of climate and forest use on biodiversity of arthropods and microbes, on decomposition rates of deadwood and on biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships at the global scale.
Module 2
This module is addressing local mechanisms driving these patterns by studying, for example, effects of climate on biotic interactions between arthropods and microbes or metabolic rates and growth of decomposer organisms under climate-change scenarios.