Plant Ecology | University of Tübingen

Welcome ...

...to the Plant Ecology group website, led by Prof. Dr. Katja Tielbörger! Here you can find information to our main research topics, our teaching, our staff, job announcements and news. Ms Tielbörger is also head of the Botanical Garden.

If you want to get us to know us better, join one of our regular group seminars which we host together with the Plant Evolutionary Ecology group! We are presenting our work in these seminars and provide you with an insight into the highly active and diverse range of research topics of the plant ecology department.

Enjoy exploring our website and feel free to contact anyone if you are interested in finding out more about any particular topics, or if you want to pay us a visit. Subscribe to our Email newsletter.

New publications

30.10.2024 ► Ivison, K., van Kleunen, M., Speed, J., …, Tielbörger, K., ... (2024). Non-Native, Non-Naturalised Plants Suffer Less Herbivory Than Native Plants Across European Botanical Gardens. Divers Distrib, e13938. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13938

14.10.2024 ► Biancari, L., Aguiar, M.R., Eldridge, D.J., ..., Liancourt, P., ..., Tielbörger, K., ..., van den Brink, L., ... (2024). Drivers of woody dominance across global drylands. Sci. Adv. 10, eadn6007. 10.1126/sciadv.adn6007

27.08.2024 ► van den Brink, L., Canessa, R., Liancourt, P., Neidhardt, H., Cavieres, L.A., Oelmann, Y., Bader, M.Y., Tielbörger, K. (2024). Increases and decreases in soil moisture in water-limited plant communities cause asymmetrical responses in biomass but not in diversity. Journal of Vegetation Science, 35, e13300. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13300

22.08.2024 ► Gross, N., Maestre, F.T., Liancourt, P. et al. (2024). Unforeseen plant phenotypic diversity in a dry and grazed world. Nature 632, 808–814. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07731-3

09.07.2024 ► Pan, X., Ferris, N.D., Applová, M., Gresse, J., ... (2024). The convex relationship between plant cover and biomass: Implications for assessing species and community properties. Journal of Vegetation Science 35(4): e13288. https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13288

22.05.2024 ► Amputu, V., Männer, F., Tielbörger, K., Knox, N. (2024). Spatio-temporal transferability of drone-based models to predict forage supply in drier rangelands. Remote Sensing 16, 1842. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16111842

12.04.2024 ► Eldridge, D.J., ..., Canessa, R., ..., Liancourt, P., ...,Tielbörger, K., ..., van den Brink, L., ... (2024). Hotspots of biogeochemical activity linked to aridity and plant traits across global drylands. Nature Plants https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01670-7

11.04.2024 ► Majekova, M., Springer, B., Ferenc, V., Gruntman, M., & Tielbörger, K. (2024). Leaf fluctuating asymmetry is not a reliable indicator of stress. Functional Ecology https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.14564

31.01.2024 ► Zimmer, K., Amputu, V., Schwarz, L.-M., Linstädter, A., Sandhage-Hofmann, A. (2024). Soil characteristics within vegetation patches are sensitive indicators of savanna rangeland degradation in central Namibia. Geoderma Regional, e00771. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geodrs.2024.e00771

29.01.2024 ► Rauschkolb, R., Bucher, S.F., Hensen, I., ..., Tielbörger, K., ... (2024). Spatial variability in herbaceous plant phenology is mostly explained by variability in temperature but also by photoperiod and functional traits. International Journal of Biometeorology https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00484-024-02621-9

25.01.2024 ► Yi, J., Wan, J., Tielbörger, K., Tao, Z., Siemann, E., Huang, W. (2024). Specialist reassociation and residence time modulate the evolution of defense in invasive plants: A meta-analysis. Ecology: e4253 https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4253

Head

Prof. Dr. Katja Tielbörger
+49 (0)7071 29-74246
Email

Admin/Secretary

Dr. Monika Doll and Team
+49 (0)7071 29-73235
Email

Address

Plant Ecology
Institute for Evolution and Ecology
University of Tübingen
Auf der Morgenstelle 5
D-72076 Tübingen

This Year's Sustainability Award for Theses (BSc)

30.10.2024

Marie Geisbusch wins this year's sustainability award of the University of Tübingen! Each year, the best BSc and MSc Theses at Tübingen University with high relevance for sustainable development run for the prize. One of this year's awards goes to Marie for her Bachelor work entitled: Restoration effects on peatland vegetation – integrating field and Landsat data.

Congratulations!

A new publication provides evidence for the enemy-release hypothesis

30.10.2024

A new paper published in Diversity and Distributions provides evidence for the enemy-release hypothesis: non-native plants suffer less herbivory than natives. The study was conduced in 15 botanical gardens across Europe and thus encompassed a very large number of non-native species. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13938

Congratulations to Katja and the Tübingen Botanical Garden!

New publication in Science Advances

14.10.2024

Katja, Liesbeth, Rafa and Pierre have co-authored a new study shedding light on the mechanisms driving of woody cover in drylands!

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn6007

New paper about drought responses of plants in Chile

27.08.2024

Liesbeth's new paper about drought responses of plants in Chile has been published! We could show that responses of plant biomass to drought and more rainfall are not in the opposite direction!

How weird is that?

Check out the manuscript under https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.13300

New publication in Nature!

22.08.2024

Pierre, Katja, Liesbeth, Rafa, and Jan from the Plant Ecology Group contributed to a new publication in Nature. This work demonstrated that the diversity of traits in desert plants can be twice as high as that of plants in humid areas. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07731-3

This highlights the importance of desert plants as a genetic reservoir and as organisms that may withstand major environmental disturbances. A picture of Katja also made the cover page of Nature today - congratulations!

https://uni-tuebingen.de/universitaet/aktuelles-und-publikationen/attempto-online/newsfullview-attempto/article/vielfalt-von-pflanzen-ist-in-wuesten-unerwartet-gross/

New funding award

19.06.2024

CIVIS Seed funding for research activities and African-European collaboration was awarded to a consortium involving Tübingen University (Dr. Sara Tomiolo, Prof. Katja Tielbörger), University of Glasgow (Dr. Natalie Welden, Dr. Michael Muir), University of Madrid (Dr. Gerardo Pulido Reyes, Dr. Francisco Leganes Nieto, Prof. Francisca Fernandes Pinas), Wits University (Dr. Dalia Saad) and Makerere University (Dr. Dramadri Isaac Onziga) to support application design measures for a cooperative interdisciplinary project.

The group led by Dr. Sara Tomiolo will develop a project proposal on "Field-based, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to assessing the impacts of atmospheric and soil-borne nano-and micro-plastic particles (NMP) on plant communities".

New DFG project: Disentangling neutral from adaptive genetic variation in light of ecological interactions

06.06.2024

Species are not homogeneous entities but show ample of intra-specific genetic variation in morphological, phenological, or behavioral traits.

Such genetic variation is a key component of biodiversity and could help species to adapt to a heterogeneous environment.

In a three-year DFG project, led by Dr. Max Schmid, both the ecological conditions favoring adaptive genetic variation within species and empirical methods to detect this part of biodiversity will be studied.

A new publication derived from the global BIODESERT project

12.04.2024

A new publication in Nature Plants derived from the global BIODESERT project shows how plant architecture and aridity shape the way in which shrubs affect biogeochemical cycling in drylands.

Congratulations to Katja, Liesbeth, Pierre, and Rafa!

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-024-01670-7