Sonja Gockel

TL;DR: The Biodiversity Exploratories (www.biodiversityexploratories.de ) as mentioned in this paper is a large-scale and long-term project for functional biodiversity, which includes a hierarchical set of standardized field plots in three different regions of Germany covering manifold management types and intensities in grasslands and forests.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors defined a compound, additive LUI index for managed grasslands including meadows and pastures, which summarizes the standardized intensity of three components of land use, namely fertilization, mowing, and livestock grazing at each site.

TL;DR: Edaphic properties, such as pH, organic carbon, total nitrogen, C/N ratio, phosphorus, nitrate, ammonium, soil moisture, soil temperature, and soil respiration, had an impact on community composition as assessed by fingerprinting, but interrelations with environmental parameters among subgroup terminal restriction fragments (T-RFs) differed significantly, e.g., different Gp1 T- RFs correlated positively or negatively with nitrogen content.

TL;DR: It is concluded that encouraging farmers to change the intensity of their land use over time could be an important strategy to maintain high biodiversity in grasslands, and a new measure of whole-ecosystem biodiversity, multidiversity is introduced, which integrates the species richness of 49 different organism groups ranging from bacteria to birds.

TL;DR: The results show that great caution is necessary when extrapolating results and management recommendations to other regions, and the importance of comparing different regions and to involve a large number of plots when studying relationships between land use and plant diversity.