DRIeR

Drought impacts, processes and resilience: making the invisible visible

This project is part of the consortium DRIeR (Drought impacts, processes and resilience: making the invisible visible), which is funded within the Baden-Württemberg Water Network.

The overall project aims at developing strategies for managing drought in an era of increased climate extremes. The focus is on hydrological processes and other sectors that directly affect hydrology. Our subproject deals with the impact of drought on semi-natural ecosystems, namely grasslands and forests. We aim at testing whether systems that are naturally exposed to higher climatic variation will be more resilient and resistant to increasing incidents of drought. In a novel experimental approach, we will study resistance and resilience simultaneously in the field and measure the response of the systems in terms of biodiversity, productivity, single plant responses and water-related ecosystem services. An associated study will utilize the ecological data for parameterizing and validating a vegetation model that studies resistance and resilience of virtual plant communities to drought.

Main Investigator: Katja Tielbörger, Nicola Lechner & Maxi Herberich