Maintenance

The ultimate testing ground for understanding the fundamental processes of nature is the large-scale patterns of species diversity across the planet. By analyzing large-scale patterns in both the terrestrial and marine environments in the context of ecological theory, null models and advanced simulation analyses, we aim to answer some of the biggest questions in ecology.

Effects of climate change and land use change on bird population trends

While both climate and land use change are recognized as top threats to biodiversity, studies on their synergistic effects are very rare. Using an unprecedented long-term citizen science program monitoring bird populations across Denmark, combined with European datasets, we aim to quantify the relative importance of climate and land use change on driving population changes over the past four decades.

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Professor Carsten Rahbek
Associate Professor Naia Morueta-Holme 

Disentangling the roles of climate change and land use on biodiversity change

Are species shifting their distributions solely to track the warming temperatures or do land use changes like land abandonment play a role? Attributing biodiversity responses to different human-driven factors is challenging due to correlations, scale-dependencies, and interaction effects between them. Further, consistent definitions and measures of land use change that can be directly related to biodiversity responses are missing. We explore the potential of high-resolution remote sensing products and ground-based imagery for improving land use measures and develop a framework for separating the impacts of land use and climate change using a range of methodologies such as meta-analysis, fieldwork, and modelling.

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Associate Professor Naia Morueta-Holme
Professor Carsten Rahbek

The global importance of mountain diversity

Mountains are home to a disproportionate amount of the world's species, appear to play a key role in generating new species, and are crucial as homes and water suppliers to humans. We are mapping these patterns across the globe and reviewing the great progress that has been made in recent years in understanding mountain diversity.

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Predictive models for species diversity

Macroecological analyses have long relied on correlative models, fitting statistical curves to observed relationships, but in recent years some of the most novel insights have come from explicitly mechanistic predictive models of species diversity. We develop a number of such models and aim to drive a paradigm shift in how we test hypotheses in macroecology.

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Professor Carsten Rahbek
Associate Professor Michael Krabbe Borregaard 

Small-scale spatiotemporal structuring of marine phytoplankton diversity

We explore how relatively small differences in the ocean environment at the local scale lead to a heterogeneous distribution of phytoplankton diversity and what effect this patchy distribution has on the maintenance of diversity at larger spatial scales.

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Professor Katherine Richardson

Modelling plankton dynamics in the open ocean

The project is part of an international project aiming to better constrain the planetary boundary on biosphere integrity. The plankton dynamics modelling will add a mechanistic description of marine plankton dynamics and biogeochemical flows to the biosphere component of the Madingley model. 

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Identifying global patterns in the vertical and horizontal distribution of ocean primary production (PP)

In this project, we examine global datasets for patterns in photosynthetic performance. It combines field and modelling studies to explore patterns in the vertical and horizontal distribution of ocean PP at various spatio and temporal scales to improve estimates of global, regional and seasonal PP.

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