Claudia Guimaraes

University of Leipzig · Institute of Geophysics and Geology

Humans modify ecosystems and biodiversity worldwide, with negative consequences for ecosystem functioning. Promoting plant diversity is increasingly suggested as a mitigation strategy. However, our mechanistic understanding of how plant diversity affects the diversity of heterotrophic consumer communities remains limited. Here, we disentangle the r...

Vertical leaf angles and their variation through time are directly related to several ecophysiological processes and properties. However, there is no efficient method for tracking leaf angles of plant canopies under field conditions. Here, we present AngleCam, a deep learning‐based approach to predict leaf angle distributions from horizontal photog...

To characterize the canopy volume of the grassland community, we calculated volume based on the voxelization technique. Hence, for each scanned plot, a voxel grid with a resolution of 5 cm was created, and the volume was then calculated as the product of the cell area and the attributed height. Further, we split scanned plots based on the voxel gri...

We performed a non-destructive measurement of plant community canopy structure and for that we used a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS). We calculate voxel grids of the 3D point clouds we used the function ‘vox’ from the R package VoxR. Volume calculation based on voxel grid generate the variables evenness and center of gravity. To calculate canopy v...

Increasing plant diversity commonly enhances standing biomass and other ecosystem functions (i.e., carbon fluxes, water use efficiency, herbivory). The standing biomass is correlated with vegetation volume, which describes plant biomass allocation within a complex canopy structure. As the canopy structure of plant communities is not static througho...

The positive relationship between plant species richness and plant productivity is supposed to be driven by complementarity effects. Based on annual measurements, long-term biodiversity experiments support complementary effects and reveal their strengthening with maturity of the plant communities. However, we still lack information on if and how th...

Canopy structure is an important driver of the energy budget of grassland ecosystem and is, at the same time, altered by plant diversity. Diverse plant communities typically have taller and more densely packed canopies than less diverse communities. With this, they absorb more radiation, have a higher transpiring leaf surface and are better coupled...

This poster shows that plant diversity controls the mean surface temperature of plant communities via vertical canopy structure while in August, horizontal canopy structure. Additionally, we won the 2019 Highly Commended Poster at the BES Conference.

Locally, plant species richness supports many ecosystem functions. Yet, the mechanisms driving these often‐positive biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships are not well understood. Spatial resource partitioning across vertical resource gradients is one of the main hypothesized causes for enhanced ecosystem functioning in more biodiverse gr...

Biodiversity often enhances ecosystem functioning likely due to multiple, often temporarily separated drivers. Yet, most studies are based on one or two snapshot measurements per year. We estimated productivity using bi-weekly estimates of high-resolution canopy height in 2 years with terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) in a grassland diversity experi...

In experimental systems, biodiversity enhances ecosystem functioning, but the underlying mechanisms are still subject to debate. Although ecologists have gone a long way to separate the mechanisms experimentally and statistically, most studies are based on one or two annual measurements of ecosystem functions although these functions are likely dri...

Understanding the mechanisms driving the dynamics of plant communities is still a challenge for ecologists, in particular in tropical forests, where species number are substantially higher than in temperate regions and population sizes are lower, respectively. Mainly two theories have been discussed intensively in this context. The neutral theory o...

We analyzed the influence of landscape configuration on fruit production and its effects on frugivorous birds in 17 forest fragments at the Atlantic Plateau of Sao Paulo. In each fragment 3 transects (100 m length) with 5 collectors were set up (in total 255 collectors). Birds were captured using 120m of mist nets along the central line. The first...