News 2015

Jodi Price, previous member of our working group, spends two weeks in Tartu. She is working together with Meelis, Riin and Antonio Gazol (via Skype) on several collaboration projects. Together, they are studying community assembly patterns in Saaremaa as well as in grasslands all over the world. Jodi finished her post-doc in Estonia two years ago and is now back in Australia at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Welcome back, Jodi!

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December 2015 Debate in Science

[img_assist|nid=417|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=260]Science has published a debate on species pools. It includes a comment by Lauri Laanisto and Michael J. Hutchings on a global-scale study of the plant productivity-diversity relationship. The global study was done by an international group led by Lauchlan Fraser and included our workgroup member Jon Bennett and colleagues from the Plant Ecology Lab. Laanisto and Hutchings reanalysed the global data using the local species pool. When the effect of the species was considered, the productivity-diversity relationship disappeared. Fraser invited Meelis Pärtel to examine this topic. In the reply, they used the more appropriate log-ratio based statistical technique developed by our workgroup and showed that although species pool indeed largely determines local richness, local richness is further limited by high productivity. In summary, both regional and local processes are shaping local biodiversity. Read more from our blog post.

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November 2015 Kersti visited Prof. Angela Moles´ lab in Australia

[img_assist|nid=416|title=Professor Angela Moles and her Big Ecology Lab.|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=195]Ph.D student Kersti Riibak visited Prof. Angela Moles´ lab at the University of New South-Wales in Sydney. During her three month visit, she worked on a project concerning species dispersal and establishment ability in collaboration with Angela Moles, Dr. Riin Tamme, Dr. Fiona Thomson, and Dr. Habacuc Flores-Moreno. In addition, Kersti participated in lab discussion-group meetings, and went to the general seminars held at the university. Besides the scientific work, the visit enabled her to do some sight-seeing in Sydney and go to the wonderful Blue Mountains National Park together with other lab members. Scientific work in Sydney was financed by the Dora T6 programme.

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November 2015 Marge attended Conference on Popularization of Science and Collaboration

[img_assist|nid=415|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=168]On 19th November, Marge participated in the conference on the popularization of science and collaboration organized by the Estonian Research Council. The conference had both a friendly atmosphere and interesting talks ranging on topics from “Scientists versus Estonian Economy” to “Popularizing Science”. Marge participated as a member of “Science Alive” project, which received national recognition in the category "Best New Initiative for Popularizing Science and Technology" for organizing the national scientific competition "The Scientific Battle 2015/Teaduslahing 2015". The leader of the competition is Marge Thetloff. Congratulations!

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November 2015 Project on community phylogenetics

[img_assist|nid=412|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=195]Pille´s personal grant „Macroecological and evolutionary determinants of community phylogenetic and functional diversity“ got financed by the Estonian Research Council for 2016-2019. Congratulations! Now looking for a prospective PhD student (e-mail to pille.gerhold@ut.ee).

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November 2015 Autumn workgroup seminar

[img_assist|nid=411|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=195]Our macroecology workgroup autumn seminar took place on November 5-6 at the Taevaskoja holiday center near Põlva. Everybody presented their novel ideas and latest results and got constructive feedback from others. In addition to scientific discussions, we also found time for a short walk in Suur Taevaskoda, and as usual evening ended with a sauna.

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October 2015 Aveliina introduced alvar grassland restoration in Estonian television

[img_assist|nid=410|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=146]In October, the alvar grassland restoration project “LIFE to Alvars” held an annual session in Muhu island, where land-owners and restoration workers received training in restoration methods and alvar grassland conservation values. Overview about two-day training and the alvar restoration project was given in Estonian television program “Osoon”, where Aveliina introduced the ecology and diversity of alvar grasslands.

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October 2015 Laelatu research station opened

[img_assist|nid=408|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=146]On 23 October we opened the University of Tartu’s Laelatu research station. Many of our workgroup members have worked in Laelatu wooded meadow and several of our research publications stem from here. For example, Laelatu wooded meadow holds the world record for plant species richness at small spatial scales. Now it is possible to live at the research station and perform many studies in the field. We are sure that the research station will serve the macroecologists well.

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October 2015 Nele and Ülle attended the "IUCN Red List Assessor Training Workshop"

[img_assist|nid=407|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=153]Nele Ingerpuu and Ülle Reier attended the "IUCN Red List Assessor Training Workshop" 28 Sept. – 01 Oct, in Tallinn. The trainers were Global Species Programme officer Caroline Pollock and junior professional Catherine Sayer from IUCN Red List Unit, UK. After four days of theory and practical exercises, 30 participants (species experts from scientific and government institutions) received certificates and are now trained to assess species for Red Lists using IUCN guidelines. The training workshop was organized by Lutreola Foundation in collaboration with IUCN Species Survival Commission, Tallinn Zoo and Estonian Environmental Board and supported by Environmental Investment Centre nature protection program grant “Estonian Red List of endangered species I”.

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October 2015 Meelis participated in the European Ecological Federation conference

[img_assist|nid=404|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=110]During 21-25 september Meelis Pärtel participated in the European Ecological Federation conference “Ecology at the interface” in Rome. He was the opening presenter at the special session “Hidden and dark diversity – from molecules to macroecology”, organized by colleague Martin Zobel. Meelis gave a presentation about observed and dark diversity of plants at the European scale. His talk got lots of positive feedback. During the session there were talks about dark diversity also by Jens-Christian Svenning and Jonathan Belmaker.

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October 2015 New paper about diversity and distribution of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi

[img_assist|nid=403|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=203]Our workgroup members Meelis Pärtel, Ülle Reier and our former colleague Inga Hiiesalu participated in a global survey conducted by the Plant Ecology Laboratory. The work explored global diversity and the distribution of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Most plant species have symbiosis with these root-inhabiting fungi and whole ecosystems depend on the presence of mycorrhiza. Over a thousand root samples were collected globally and fungal species were determined through DNA analyses. A surprising finding was a very cosmopolitan distribution of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, in contrast to distribution of plant species. Phylogenetic analysis showed that most studied fungal species originate from times after the major separation of continents. Therefore effective dispersal is a proper explanation of their distribution. The work was published in Science.

Davison, J., Moora, M., Öpik, M., Adholeya, A., Ainsaar, L., Bâ, A., Burla, S., Diedhiou, A.G., Hiiesalu, I., Jairus, T., Johnson, N.C., Kane,A., Koorem, K., Kochar, M., Ndiaye, C., Pärtel, M., Reier, Ü., Saks, Ü., Singh, R., Vasar, M., Zobel M. Global assessment of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus diversity reveals very low endemism. Science 349: 970-973.

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September 2015 Forest project

[img_assist|nid=402|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=204]In collaboration with workgroups at University of Tartu and at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, we started a project "Smart nature conservation in Estonian natural and managed forests: A case study of southern Estonia with practical solutions from Ecoinformatics". The project is financed by the
State Forest Management Centre. With the help of characteristic, derived and dark diversity, we will reveal the optimal diversity measures and management strategies for Estonian forests.

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September 2015 New paper about post-glacial structure of Estonian plant communities

[img_assist|nid=400|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=107]Pille and Meelis participated in an exciting study led by Triin Reitalu (Institute of Geology, Tallinn University of Technology), revealing the changes in functional and phylogenetic structure of the vegetation in Estonia during the whole post-glacial time from 14 500 yrs BP with the help of pollen data. We found that although species richness has increased, both functional and phylogenetic diversity have decreased during this time, and we attribute this to human impact that has suppressed plants with certain traits (functional convergence) and given advantage to plants from certain phylogenetic lineages (phylogenetic clustering).

Reitalu, T., Gerhold, P., Poska, A., Pärtel, M., Väli, V., and Veski, S. (2015) Novel insights into post-glacial vegetation change: functional and phylogenetic diversity in pollen records. Journal of Vegetation Science 26: 911-922.

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September 2015 Aveliina is participating in the compilation of IPBES Regional Assessment

[img_assist|nid=409|title=IPBES meeting in Switzerland|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=146]From 2015 to 2017, Aveliina is participating as a lead author in compilation of Regional Assessment for Europe and Central Asia of Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES is a leading intergovernmental body for assessing the state of the planet's biodiversity, its ecosystems and the essential services they provide to society. In the beginning of September, kick-off meeting of regional assessment for Europe and Central Asia was held in Engelberg, Switzerland.

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September 2015 Welcome, Madli

[img_assist|nid=397|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=150|height=150]We are happy to welcome the new doctoral student Madli Jõks to Macroecology workgroup! She will study ’dark diversity’ (i.e. species that are missing from the otherwise suitable community) on different space scales and in different plant communities, using empirical data, as well as computer simulations. Madli is supervised by professor Meelis Pärtel.

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August 2015 Aveliina’s interview with science portal Novaator and international blog of Tartu University

[img_assist|nid=406|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=146]Science news portal Novaator visited our senior researcher Aveliina Helm in her home and they discussed her passions from science and nature conservation to sheep raising. On August, Aveliina and international blog of Tartu University carried out a brief and light interview in Twitter - a “twitterview”.

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August 2015 Tsipe attended the IUFRO Landscape Ecology Conference

[img_assist|nid=401|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=146]During 23th – 30 August, Tsipe participated in IUFRO (International Union of Forest Research Organizations) Landscape Ecology Conference in Tartu, organized by the University of Life Sciences, University of Tartu and Tartu Observatory. More than 200 participants all around the world shared their experiences, knowledge, and discussed more about the ecosystem services in forest landscapes. Tsipe gave an oral presentation about Gene flow of a grassland plant Lychnis flos-cuculi: The effect of landscape and network connectivity.

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August 2015 Fieldworks on alvar grassland restoration sites

[img_assist|nid=396|title=Fieldworks on alvar grasslands|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=146]
Last year, the large-scale alvar grassland restoration project 'LIFE to Alvars' was launched in Estonia, financed by the European Commission LIFE+ Nature program and Estonian Environmental Investment Centre. The project aims to restore 2500 hectares of the most valuable, but currently overgrown alvar grasslands in Western Estonia by 2019, and to provide local farmers with the knowledge and infrastructure for successive grazing that is necessary for long-term persistence of these valuable grasslands. Macroecology workgroup, in collaboration with experts from other fields, will be observing the effect of restoration on biodiversity. This summer, we quantified the pre-restoration environmental conditions of habitats and recorded the status of vascular plants, bryophytes, spiders, butterflies, bumblebees, birds and mycorrhiza. Such extensive biodiversity monitoring is necessary for accurate assessment of restoration success in the future.

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July 2015 Fieldworks completed for project aiming to predict invasion

[img_assist|nid=391|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=172]This summer Jon together with Kersti, Ene and Ülle finished work on a major field experiment testing whether they can use the trait relationships among different components of the species pool to better predict invasion. Across 32 sites, they collected data on the environment, the species pool, the local community, and the success of invaders transplanted into the sites. In total, they surveyed 320 ha, estimated species cover over 2000 times, and measured 1000 plants – a lot of work. Let’s hope the results are interesting! See also the photo gallery.

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July 2015 Visiting Ph.D students Felícia and Anaclara

[img_assist|nid=390|title=Anaclara and Felícia in Estonia|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=181]Ph.D students Felícia Fischer and Anaclara Guido from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil visited our workgroup in June-July under Pille´s supervision and with the support of the program DoRa 5. Felícia shed light on dark diversity by using functional traits in Jon´s experiment. Anaclara explored the role of functional beta diversity in community invasibility.

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July 2015 New paper about accurate dark diversity estimates

[img_assist|nid=387|title=Beal´s probability index|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=160]Dr. Rob Lewis together with Meelis and Robert published recently a new paper about accurate dark diversity estimates. Using extensive vegetation data from Scottish grasslands and forest vegetation plots from Switzerland, the authors tested empirically whether species ecological requirements (Ellenberg values) or species co-occurrences provide accurate estimates of dark diversity. The results showed that both species ecological requirements and species co-occurrence patterns provide an opportunity to examine dark diversity of ecological systems. However, the co-occurrence method was shown to be more accurate than the Ellenberg method. The study demonstrates that dark diversity for a community can be successfully estimated using readily available data, through exploring species co-occurrence patterns. Accurate estimates of dark diversity help to improve our knowledge of the mechanisms governing species co-existence.

Lewis, R. J., Szava‐Kovats, R. and Pärtel, M. (2015) Estimating dark diversity and species pools: An empirical assessment of two methods. Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

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July 2015 IAVS in Brno

[img_assist|nid=383|title=During the conference, it was possible to visit species-rich White Carpathian grasslands.|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=141]This year, the 58th Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science was held in Brno (Czech Republic) on 19-24th July. Many of us took part in a collective bus trip to Brno and back, which allowed some sight-seeing in stopping points. Five days of the conference in Brno were filled with nice talks and discussions, and we were happy to see old members of our group and other collaborators. Jon, Kersti, Argo, and the previous members of our group – Rob Lewis and Inga Hiiesalu presented talks in the special session of dark diversity, chaired by Meelis Pärtel and Francesco de Bello. Liis´ talk concentrated on habitat size - functional diversity relationship. Pille had a poster about the determinants of phylogenetic community structure at broad scales and Ene´s poster concentrated on hybridization in Pulmonaria species.
The young scientist presentation award went this time to Inga Hiiesalu.
Congratulations, Inga!

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Mai 2015 Meelis introduced Estonian biodiversity to wider audience

Meelis Pärtel wrote about developments and patterns of biodiversity in Estonian culture newspaper "Sirp" and gave a talk about a same topic in a television of University of Tartu (UTTV) (in Estonian).

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May 2015 Contact seminar with the Estonian Ministry of Environment

[img_assist|nid=376|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=195]On the 19th of May, the Ministry of Environment and Doctoral School of Earth Sciences and Ecology organized a joint seminar in Tartu, where doctoral students and researchers from the University of Tartu and University of Life Sciences made an overview about their scientific research and its application opportunities in nature conservation. Marge and Liis gave oral presentations about the importance of genetic methods and landscape structure in effective nature conservation management. From now on, similar seminars will be organized regularly each year to promote the co-operation between universities and Estonian environmental organizations.

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May 2015 Marge attended the Plant Population Biology Conference

[img_assist|nid=380|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=146]During 14-16 May, Marge participated in the Plant Population Biology Conference organized by the University of Tübingen. The conference had both, a friendly atmosphere and interesting talks ranging on topics from epigenetics to species distributional modelling. Marge participated with a poster - "The effect of landscape changes on the genetic diversity and fitness of plants: a case study of a grassland plant Trifolium montanum".

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Mai 2015 Expedition to Morocco

[img_assist|nid=381|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=173]Kersti, Silvia and Meelis participated in an expedition to Morocco, organized by the Doctoral School of Earth Sciences and Ecology. During 26th April to 14th May, in total of 18 doctoral students from different Estonian universities collected data for their personal research projects with the help of supervisors. Kersti and Silvia collected vegetation data from the Mediterranean shrub-lands to study dispersal processes in those communities. In addition, small-scale plant species richness and environmental data was collected from the meadows of the High Atlas as a part of our workgroup's global grassland study.

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April 2015 Spring workgroup seminar

[img_assist|nid=375|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=195]Our workgroup spring seminar took place on April 14-15 in a nice country hotel in Palamuse parish. As usually, everybody presented their novel ideas and fresh results and received feedback from others. In addition to scientific discussions, there was some time for the sauna. At the end of the seminar many of us visited the school-house from 19th century in Palamuse.

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March 2015 Goodbye Rob

[img_assist|nid=292|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=150|height=150]The macroecology workgroup bid farewell to Dr. Rob Lewis last week, who had been a member of the group for two years. During his post-doc, Rob worked mainly on accurate dark diversity estimates and its application on nature conservation, but he collaborated also with the Plant Ecology Lab and his previous lab from the University of Liverpool, covering several fields of ecology. Now Rob is off to new challenges in the workgroup of Dr. J.C. Svenning at the Aarhus University. We wish him all the best in this endeavour and hope he will visit us soon!

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March 2015 Visiting postdoc from The Czech Academy of Science

[img_assist|nid=373|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=150|height=181]Ondřej Mudrák, a postdoc from Třeboň, Institute of Botany, The Czech Academy of Science, will spend two months in our working group. He is vegetation ecologist dealing with succession, restoration ecology and grassland management. In Tartu he works on dark diversity estimations during the plant community succession in various disturbed sites.

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March 2015 Habitat restoration requires landscape-scale planning

[img_assist|nid=374|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=200|height=205]Aveliina published a commentary titled "Habitat restoration requires landscape-scale planning" to the paper by Prach et al "Landscape context in colonization of restored dry grasslands by target species" in Applied Vegetation Science. Both contributions emphasized the significance of surrounding landscape context for successful restoration of habitats. Aveliina brought an example from Estonia, where current and historical landscape structure was taken into account while selecting alvar grassland restoration sites for the project LIFE to Alvars.

Helm, A. 2015. Habitat restoration requires landscape-scale planning. Applied Vegetation Science 18: 177-178

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March 2015 Rob attended the Norwegian Ecological Society conference in Bergen

[img_assist|nid=370|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=195]During 12th –13th March Rob participated in the second Norwegian Ecological Society (NØF) biennial meeting, organized by the University of Bergen. Conference focussed on characterizing past, present and future ecological dynamics, identifying key drivers of change, and using the knowledge gained from these studies for applied ecology and conservation. Rob gave an oral presentation about accurate species pool measures through dark diversity estimates. He won the best talk award, congratulations!

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March 2015 Tiina Talve defended her PhD thesis!

[img_assist|nid=372|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=150|height=180]On the 3rd of March, Tiina Talve successfully defended her thesis “Genetic diversity and taxonomy within the genus Rhinanthus“ and was awarded with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Botany and Mycology. Tiina was supervised by Tatjana, and the official opponent during the defence was Professor Mikael Hedrén from the Lund University (Sweden).

Congratulations, Dr. Talve!

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March 2015 Aveliina became the top 1% most cited scientist in the world

[img_assist|nid=253|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=173]We are happy to announce that according to Essential Science Indicators database Aveliina is also now the top 1% most cited scientist in the world! Congratulations!!! The new list of Highly Cited Researchers was compiled with a different method using only Highly Cited Papers during last ten years. Highly Cited Papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year indexed in the Web of Science, which is generally but not always year of publication.

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February 2015 Seminar at the Estonian Ministry of the Environment

[img_assist|nid=368|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=173]The researchers of the macroecology workgroup (Aveliina Helm, Tatjana Oja, Ülle Reier, Silvia Pihu, Tsipe Aavik) visited Estonian Ministry of Environment to give an overview of conservation genetics research carried out in the laboratory of the Department of Botany. In addition, together with nature conservation practitioners from the Ministry of Environment and Environmental Board we discussed conservationally important topics, where we could implement our conservation genetic competence.

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February 2015 New paper: Phylogeny is no proxy for community assembly

[img_assist|nid=369|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=192]Pille and coauthors published a review paper in Functional Ecology in which they challenge the modern approach of using phylogenetic relationships of coexisting species in communities as proxy for the ecological mechanisms that have assembled the community (competition vs. habitat filtering). The authors highlighting the pitfalls of the key assumptions behind this approach and show that these assumptions are not robustly supported by theory and data. Instead, the authors suggest there are other benefits of quantifying community phylogenetic structure. Specifically, one can study whether (1) present-day coexistence affects evolution: for example, coexisting close relatives develop different traits in order to better coexist which leads to emergence of new species; (2) evolution affects present-day coexistence: for example, communities of close relatives are more invasible for evolutionary reasons: alien species occupy the space that is vacant due to the historical lack of distantly related species.

See also the summary of the paper

Gerhold, P., Cahill, J. F. Jr., Winter, M., Bartish, I. V. and Prinzing, A. (2015) Phylogenetic patterns are not proxies of community assembly mechanisms (they are far better). Functional Ecology 29: 600–614.

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February 2015 Visiting MSc student from France
[img_assist|nid=367|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=112|height=161]

Thomas Galland from the University of Toulouse (France) will spend a three months (February-April) in our working group. He will be working together with Aveliina on an alvar restoration project (LIFE-to-Alvars).















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February 2015 Visit by Anu Eskelinen
[img_assist|nid=365|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=112|height=161]

Anu Eskelinen from University of California visited our workgroup at the end of January. She gave a lecture about low-productivity ecosystems (“Global change and low-productivity ecosystems: interactions among biotic ecosystems components and changing environmental conditions) and had several scientific meetings with people from our department.














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January 2015 New article: Dark diversity mapped at the European scale

[img_assist|nid=362|title=|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=290]

Argo, Robert and Meelis published a paper in Ecography, where they applied a novel methodology to quantify for the European-wide plant dark diversity: absent species that are potentially able to disperse to studied site and can tolerate local environmental conditions. Traditionally observed species have been used to investigate large scale diversity patterns. Dark diversity allows us to study how complete site diversity is: how much of the species pool is realized in each locality. While the observed diversity follows the latitudinal gradient, more species are found in warmer regions, the results of this study reveal high completeness of site diversity in both north and south Europe. Mountainous areas in Europe show particularly high completeness of site diversity: species that can cope with corresponding harsh conditions have managed to disperse there and have resisted extinctions. The results of this study can be applied in the planning of nature conservation at the European scale.

Ronk, A., Szava-Kovats, R. and Pärtel, M. (2015) Applying the dark diversity concept to plants at the European scale. Ecography 38, 1015-1025.

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[img_assist|nid=361|title=Riin Tamme defended her thesis|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=260|height=146]January 2015 Riin Tamme defended her PhD thesis!

On 26th of January, Riin Tamme successfully defended her thesis “The relationship between small-scale environmental heterogeneity and plant species diversity“ and was awarded with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Botany and Mycology. Riin was supervised by Meelis, and the official opponent during the defence was Professor Heather Reynolds from the Indiana University (USA). Riin will continue her scientific work in the University of New South Wales in Australia, in Professor Angela Moles´ research group.

Congratulations, Dr. Tamme!

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January 2015 Liina and Aveliina attended a biogeography conference in Bayreuth, Germany
[img_assist|nid=360|title=Aveliina's talk at plenary session|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=260|height=215]