ScapeLabs Experimental Platform
Detecting potential future shifts in biodiversity due to land use or climate change and its consequences for ecosystem functioning requires large-scale and long-term studies. The large-scale ‘landScape Laboratories’ (ScapeLabs) address the landscape scale for biodiversity-ecosystem functioning studies. The explicit aim to combine modeling studies with the research conducted within the framework of different ScapeLabs allows synthesizing and transferring the research findings obtained for different ecosystems and landscapes. The ScapeLabs have been successfully established during the BIBS project:
The single ScapeLabs:
AgroScapeLab
The AgroScapeLab Quillow (ASLQ) is located in the Quillow region, about 90 km north of Berlin. It is set-up as a large-scale landscape laboratory to study the impacts and relationships of agricultural landscape structures on landscape processes and to conduct long-term landscape monitoring. It is run by the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and its partners. It is closely linked to ZALFs experimental infrastructure platform in Dedelow. In addition it serves as an LTER-site and is part of the TERENO initiative.
The ASLQ provides an excellent infrastructure for interdisciplinary landscape research to conduct cross-scale experiments on multiple temporal and spatial scales. Past and current research activities address interactions between landscape structures, agricultural management, hydrology, biogeochemistry and biodiversity. Future activities within the ASLQ will focus more on sustainable crop production to face the challenge of climate change and corresponding feedbacks on the environment and productivity and to use it as a comprehensive data cube to analyse complex processes with powerful modern data mining approaches.
LakeScapeLab
The LakeScapeLab provides the infrastructure for ecosystem-scale experiments to assess
- fundamental biodiversity dynamics,
- impacts of environmental change on aquatic biodiversity and proceses,
- consequences of aquatic-terrestrial coupling.
Link to the website of the LakeScapeLab.
CityScapeLabs
The CityScapeLabs use the entire city region of Berlin as an urban landscape laboratory to study impacts of urbanization on biodiversity and ecological processes. With currently two standardized study systems, dry grassland patches and urban ponds, it covers a wide urbanization gradient from the rural countryside to the inner city. It is run by the Technical University Berlin (TU Berlin) and its partners within BBIB. A With all experimental sites being exactly located and marked, the CityScapeLabs also provide a large-scale monitoring platform to track long-term biodiversity changes in a city region.
To capture realistic effects of urbanity, the experimental sites are generally not insulated from urban land uses and are open accessible. Focusing on patches as basic experimental units allows for scale crossing studies on different taxonomic groups. The sites are open to experimental manipulation and can be equipped with advanced instrumentation to measure environmental variables. The CityScapeLabs thus provide an excellent infrastructure for exploring urban impacts on complex biotic systems. Completed and ongoing studies address biotic interactions across different trophic levels, multitaxon studies of urban biodiversity patterns and above-belowground interactions in urban landscapes.
For further information please mail to: Moritz von der Lippe.