This project has yielded over 80 peer-reviewed publications, including several in top journals. The PI has actively disseminated results via social media (>13K followers on X/ Twitter; and many other platforms, including LinkedIn, mastodon, bluesky and instagram), in many invited talks, and in interaction with artists (several exhibits, 2 film productions, one music piece composed based on data from one of our key papers).
We have performed a range of experiments comparing gradual and abrupt change in environmental factors. In one notable case, the gradual change had greater effects than the abrupt change, contrary to what is mostly found. In a major conceptual advance, we have integrated >60 concepts with a temporal component in ecology, placing them in a common framework. This framework is a nested hierarchical framework recognizing several levels of complexity (from single events, to multiple events to trajectory), and serves to unify temporal ecology. This work places the abrupt vs. gradual focus of the project into a broader context.
We have established microplastic as a factor in global change biology, by providing a keystone review paper, many conceptual advances, and several pioneering papers describing experimental results on soil and soil ecosystems. These results have been widely disseminated, and have been met with a lot of interest from the media (print, radio, podcast and several times of German national and regional TV) and the public. In addition to many laboratory and greenhouse experiments, we have also made conceptual advances, including the appreciation of microplastic as a pollutant where the shape and interior volume (releasing additives) is important for understanding effects (leading to the concept of the global toxicity debt of microplastic). Work recently culminated in a review paper in Nature Reviews Microbiology on the plastisphere, summarizing much of the work on this new ecosystem compartment.
We additionally set up up and successfully completed a first complex and unprecedented experiment to examine the multi-factorial effects of global change on soil properties and functions, with a focus on fungi. The results suggest that effects of an increasing number of global change factors eventually become unpredictable from single-factor responses, and harbor ecological surprises. The design we pioneered for this lab experiment (random sampling from a pool of factors) has now been used in many additional experiments, and also in the field: the Berlin Global Change Experiment is still ongoing. This experimental work has also been accompanied by several conceptual advances, mainly related to factor classification (including the first trait-based classification for global change drivers), and most recently, insights into at what levels of the ecological hierarchy different factors enter. We also found the signature of the number of factors in a global obsevational study.
