You don’t often see velvet worms (Onychophora)! Arianna is currently sorting the arthropods from litter extractions of the Reassembly plots. We got excited to see the first velvet worm in this sample. Only few onychophorans are known from Ecuador so far. Fernando Villagomez immediately looked for some morphological details and …
Das “Reassembly” Projekt im Regenwald Ecuadors wurde nun erstmal ausführlich einer interessierten Öffentlichkeit in einem Vortrag vorgestellt. Im Hessischen Landesmuseum berichtete Nico Blüthgen von den Hintergründen und der Entstehungsgeschichte des Forschungsprojekts — und von den ersten Ergebnissen. Das Thema stiess auf eine große Resonanz und wurde anschließend ausführlich diskutiert. Eingeladen …
Our ambitious perturbation experiment was an enormous, unexpected effort – on a total of 30 plots. Four 10 x 10 m treatments had to be marked per plot, two of them fenced, vegetation and litter was removed from two treatments, and the amount removed was quantified. Seed/litter traps were installed, …
Quite calmly, our research activities in one of the best tropical field labs have just begun earlier this year. What a fantastic new place, equipped with modern lab interior and great working conditions and (still) a lot of space for our large group and more. What an incredible view on …
Does our research contribute to restoring biodiversity and climate? There is an ongoing discussion around ‘natural solutions’ for climate, and the potential of forest restoration for carbon capture and mitigation of global warming. One of the key papers in this controversial debate was a Science paper in 2019 from Thomas …
[in German only] Als Geschäftsführer der Fundación Jocotoco berichtete Martin Schaefer über den Naturschutz in Ecuador – in der Vortragsreihe des Nationalparks Bayerischer Wald. Wie funktioniert effektiver Naturschutz in privaten Reservaten – Tieflandregenwald, Hochland und Galapagos? Welche Prioriäten gibt es, welche Probleme treten auf? Der sehr informative Vortrag gibt einen …
First exciting network results of our first Bachelor student in Reassembly, Jan Johann (in SP6). His analysis supports one of our key hypotheses: networks become more complex when forest recover, shown by an increase in the exponential Shannon diversity of links (eH2). Here, the trophic network is represented the distribution …
Our first analysis and paper on rainforest reassembly focuses on ants. During his PhD thesis, Phil Hoenle collected and identified a total of 283 ant species from litter, ground and tree trunks in 61 plots. The diversity was relatively high even in the agricultural sites, but ant community composition and …
While part of the team already disappeared in the djungle, some of us just had a first inspiring meeting across different subprojects on how to connect theory and empiry when it comes to mutualistic network assembly. Our theoreticists from SP1 kicked off the meeting with an input presentation about their …
Four snapshots from a wildlife camera campaign across our study plots performed by the Team Fabrikschleichach. A puma (Puma concolor), jaguar (Panthera onca), tayra (Eira barbara) and an ozelot (Leopardus pardalis) walked through the forest plots in November 2021.
