Lab talk from five presenters

Merging geography and ecology

Biodiversity under climate change and land use change

• Responses across and within species and communities?
• Role of microclimates and geodiversity?

Adam Williamson

• Explaining ITV (Intraspecific plant variation) with microclimates
• Kilpisjärvi large dataset of plant Functional Traits
  • Correlated with microclimates, like a log placed ontheground
• Mean temperature range across 40kobs of 350 species across the nordics (800 sites)
  • Some have wider temperature niches, some have narrower

Temperature and height modeling

• Bayesian hierarchial model with varying slope and intercept
• Lots of uncertainty, this is the beginning of his PhD

Adam Mahood

Intrapecific trait variation and plant ecological strategies

Two strategies in dry land ecosystems

Strategy 1: Grow fast in response to (annual) stress

• Produce as many seeds and possible and outgrow other plants

Strategy 2: Grow slowly and devote resources to minimizing water loss

The difference between these strategies can be explored by leaf dry matter ccontent (LDMC), which is related to relative growth rate. An example was measuring organic carbon in a restored meadow looking at native perennial plants and invasive grasses.

Data analyzed with random forest model. High LDMC (slower growth) happens with higher CaCO3 and opposite with annual grass cover. Lots of interesting trends. Microclimates have not been incorporated with this - need to incorporate soil temperature maps

Aino-Maija Määttänen

Relationship between vascular plant functional trait diversity and geodiversity

Geodiversity

• A measure of the differences of geomorphological, hydrological, soil and geological feature diversity - the abiotic component of biodiversity
• Originally created for conservation focus
  
• We would assume that higher geodiversity would result in more species richness and functional trait diversity, this hypothesis is being tested by Aino-Maija

Geodiversity across Finland

• Datset from Oulu university (Tukianen et al. 2017) "Georichness" (like species richness) raster grid
• Funcional diversity from massive Finland dataset, needs some corrections for biased samples.

Camilla Reinikainen

How does geodiversity afffect snow dynamics, microclimates, growing season legnth and biodiversity in Arctic environments?

1. Does geodiversity have a shaping effect on snow cover variations in the Arctic?
   1. Snow depth variation between years and plots
   2. Hypothesis: Plots with higher geodiversity andmore heterogenous topography vary more than inverse...
2. How is this reflected in microclimate heterogeneity and plant diversity?
3. ALl of these together effects on forming microrefugia for endangered species?

This is soo cool.....