Billur Bektaş

• PhD in Biodiversity Ecology and Environment
• PostDoc Position at ETH Zurich

Global warming is changing plant communities due to the arrival of new species from warmer regions and declining abundance of cold‐adapted species. However, experimentally testing predictions about trajectories and rates of community change is challenging because we normally lack an expectation for future community composition, and most warming exp...

The re‐assembly of plant communities during climate warming depends on several concurrent processes. Here, we present a novel framework that integrates spatially explicit sampling, plant trait information and a warming experiment to quantify shifts in these assembly processes. By accounting for spatial distance between individuals, our framework al...

Mountain grasslands contain large stocks of soil organic carbon (SOC), of which a good part is in labile particulate form. This labile SOC may be protected by cold climate that limits microbial activity. Strong climate change in mountain regions threatens to destabilize these SOC stocks. However, so far the climate response of SOC stocks in mountai...

At the edge of the sixth mass extinction, Anthropos continues the quest of “naming the other” with the promise that identifying all the species on Earth will be the main step of assuring their conservation. However, by self-positioning as the only name-giver, Anthropos has only sharpened the human-nonhuman dualism and restricted kinship to only Ant...

In the current biodiversity crisis, one of the crucial questions is how quickly plant communities can acclimate to climate warming and longer growing seasons to buffer the impairment of community functioning. Answering this question is pivotal especially for mountain grasslands that experience harsh conditions but provide essential ecosystem servic...

Modeling species distributions over space and time is one of the major research topics in both ecology and conservation biology. Joint Species Distribution models (JSDMs) have recently been introduced as a tool to better model community data, by inferring a residual covariance matrix between species, after accounting for species' response to the en...

West Anatolia (WA) has been a center of human population through the Holocene period. Theories about a past tree-cover reduction of this historically and biologically important spot are divergent between natural climatic and anthropogenic impacts. While WA climate changed from wetter to drier conditions throughout the Holocene, the latter preserves...