The Group

Our group brings together scientists with diverse backgrounds to explore cutting edge questions in plant population, community and ecosystem ecology. Although all of us work at the interface of theory and experiments in plant systems, current and past members have research and education backgrounds that span fields from ecology to evolution, systems from marine to terrestrial environments, and approaches from the mathematical to the experimental.

Our approach

In our group we are fascinated by the ecological and evolutionary forces that shape species' distributions and variation in plant community structure and functioning. Understanding the constraints on species' range margins and community composition is not only a long-standing goal of basic ecological research, it is also central to predicting impacts of environmental change – for example through biological invasions or climate change – on ecosystems. Our approach to tackle these challenges is diverse, but hinges on field experiments and observations integrated with mathematical descriptions of community dynamics from ecological theory. We frequently work along steep environmental gradients, especially elevation gradients here in Switzerland and elsewhere, where manipulative experiments and long-term observations allow us to disentangle the factors shaping plant communities and how they respond to changing climate.

The broader impacts of our research

In addition to advancing a fundamental understanding of ecological processes, our research informs the management of invasive plant species and the preservation of native species diversity in a changing climate. Our blend of population models and field experiments allows us to forecast the impacts of biological invasions and changing climates on longer time scales than possible with empirical work alone. Ongoing work, for example, shows how non-native plants are spreading into relatively uninvaded high-elevation ecosystems in mountains, and how changing species interactions affect the persistence of alpine plant populations faced with warming climate.