BadBug
Project overview
BugNet is a global collaborative research network investigating the importance and impact of invertebrate herbivores and pathogenic fungi on plant communities and ecosystems. The network aims to better understand how strongly these consumer groups shape ecological communities and how context-dependent their effects are along environmental gradients.
The background to the project is that much theoretical work predicts that the effect of consumers changes along environmental gradients. This effect probably depends on abiotic conditions at large spatial scales, such as climate, latitude, altitude or productivity, but also on small-scale factors such as plant diversity, soil fertility or the abundance of predators.
Background
To date, it is poorly understood how consumer communities and their effects change along such environmental gradients. Existing studies often differ greatly in their methodology, which makes it difficult to make general statements about larger spatial scales.
BugNet responds to this knowledge gap with a comparative approach based on standardised protocols across many locations. Especially with regard to global environmental changes such as climate and land-use change, this understanding is important for predicting how consumer communities and their ecological function will change.
Objectives
BugNet pursues two central objectives:
- Collect data on functional traits of plant and invertebrate communities to investigate how the functional composition of invertebrate communities changes along abiotic and biotic gradients.
- Set up identical exclusion experiments for invertebrate herbivores and fungal pathogens to quantify the responses of plant communities and ecosystems to insects, molluscs and pathogenic fungi in a wide range of herb-dominated ecosystems.
These range from desert grasslands and arctic tundra to heathlands and Mediterranean shrublands.
Approach
The central methodological approach of BugNet is to conduct comparable exclusion experiments across many sites using standardised protocols. In this way, differences in the effect of consumer groups can be systematically recorded and compared between regions and environmental conditions.
The network thus creates the basis for better understanding the significance of biotic interactions and mechanistically analysing their dependence on the respective environmental context.
Integration of the project
The project is part of the international BugNet network, which is supported by the University of Bern, the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR).
For the Würzburg project site, this network reference can be used to make the integration into a larger international research environment visible. If BadBug is the local or site-specific contribution to this network, this should be explicitly added on the final page.
Project information
| PI: | Prof. Dr Malte Jochum |
| Subject: | Herbivores and plant pathogens |
| Study site: | BadBug Experiment in Bad Lauchstädt |
| Funding: | NA |
| Duration: | since 2021 |
| Collaborators: | Dr Lotte Korell, Prof Dr Nico Eisenhauer, Dr Martin Schädler, Harald Auge |
| Staff: | Ioannis Constantinou (PhD candidate; iDiv, Leipzig University) |
| Links: | https://www.bug-net.org/ |
