
Johannes MetzUniversity of Hildesheim · Plant Ecology & Nature Conservation
Johannes Metz
PhD
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27
Publications
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (27)
Competition in mesic sites and drought stress combined with short growing seasons in drier sites are key environmental factors along macroclimatic aridity gradients. They impose a triangular trade‐off for local adaptation. However, as experiments have rarely disentangled their effects on plant fitness, uncertainty remained whether mesic populations...
Zusammenfassung
1. Anhand eines umfassenden Datensatzes von Langzeit-Zähldaten (1993 – 2020) von 84 Populationen von D. majalis in Brandenburg untersuchten wir generelle Entwicklungstendenzen der Populationen sowie die Auswirkungen der Flächengröße und zehn Klimafaktoren auf das Populationswachstum.
2. Die Mehrheit der D. majalis – Populationen war...
When plant populations show local adaptation along climatic gradients, climate change may displace them from their current fitness optima. Unclear is whether foreign genotypes originating from sites that approximate future climatic conditions can attain higher fitness and support existing populations, because foreign genotypes may lack important ad...
Central European semi-natural wet grasslands are known for their high nature value and diversity of rare and endangered species. However, they are experiencing deteriorating habitat quality and species losses, a problem that may aggravate with climate change. Identifying key factors that jeopardize wet grassland species is an urgent task for effect...
Heavy metals transported by rivers are deposited in sediments and floodplains, and floodplain soils act as both sinks and sources of these metals. The Innerste River is contaminated by historical metal ore mining, processing, and smelting in the Harz Mountains (Germany). Our study compared the uptake of lead (Pb) and zinc (Zn) in wild blackberries...
We studied heavy metal levels in floodplain soils of the Innerste River in northern Germany and in the leaves of wild blackberries (Rubus fruticosus L. agg.) growing within and in adjacent areas outside the river floodplain. Heavy metal contamination of the Innerste floodplain is a legacy of historical metal ore mining, processing, and smelting in...
Rapid evolution of traits and of plasticity may enable adaptation to climate change, yet solid experimental evidence under natural conditions is scarce. Here, we imposed rainfall manipulations (+30%, control, -30%) for 10 years on entire natural plant communities in two Eastern Mediter-ranean sites. Additional sites along a natural rainfall gradien...
We examined long-term population trends and potential threats for the endangered wetland orchid Dactylorhiza majalis in nature reserves in Brandenburg, NE-Germany. To this aim, census data between 1975 and 2016 for 51 sites were assembled and complemented by recent vegetation surveys.
The majority of populations (76 %) were stable or increased dur...
Germination marks a critical transition in plant life that is prone to high mortality. Strong selection pressure is therefore expected to finely tune it to environmental conditions. Our study on the common Mediterranean grass Brachypodium hybridum assessed whether germination behavior changes systematically along a steep natural rainfall gradient r...
This study tested systematically at two spatial scales for key traits shaping within-species ecotypic differentiation under increasing aridity. It assessed different plant strategy theories and considered potential implications for climate change.
We studied the widespread Mediterranean grass Brachypodium hybridum. At large scale, we tested 14 pop...
Long and short-term climatic variation affect the ability of plants to simultaneously cope with increasing abiotic stress and biotic interactions. Specifically, ecotypes adapted to different climatic conditions (i.e., long-term legacy) may have to adjust their allocation to chemical defenses against enemies under acute drought (i.e., short-term res...
The ecological benefits of polyploidy are intensely debated. Some authors argue that plants with duplicated chromosome sets (polyploids) are more stress-resistant and superior colonizers and may thus outnumber their low ploidy conspecifics in more extreme habitats. Brachypodium distachyon (sensu lato), for example, a common annual grass in Israel a...
Bet‐hedging via between‐year seed dormancy is a costly strategy for plants in unpredictable environments. Theoretically, fitness costs can be reduced through a parental environmental effect when the environment is partly predictable. We tested whether populations from environments that differ in predictability diverged in parental effects on seed d...
Defining species by their climatic niche is the simple and intuitive principle underlying Bioclimatic Envelope Model (BEM) predictions for climate change effects. However, these correlative models are often criticised for neglecting many ecological processes. Here, we apply the same niche principle to entire communities within a medium/long-term cl...
Plant–plant interactions may critically modify the impact of climate change on plant communities. However, the magnitude and even direction of potential future interactions remains highly debated, especially for water‐limited ecosystems. Predictions range from increasing facilitation to increasing competition with future aridification.
The differen...
Parental effects ( PE ) can be adaptive and improve offspring performance when parents and offspring experience similar environmental conditions. However, it is unknown whether adaptive PE exist also in habitats where such similarity is unlikely due to strong temporal variation. In particular, we do not know whether PE can adapt offspring to fluctu...
For evaluating climate change impacts on biodiversity, extensive experiments are urgently needed to complement popular non-mechanistic models which map future ecosystem properties onto their current climatic niche. Here, we experimentally test the main prediction of these models by means of a novel multi-site approach. We implement rainfall manipul...
Aridity does not only vary along different regions but the frequency of drought is also supposed to increase in the future as a consequence of climate change. Plants may respond to changes in abiotic conditions by adjusting their investment in resources such as chemical defences against herbivores and pathogens. However, knowledge is scarce about h...
The eastern Mediterranean faces a severe water crisis: water supply decreases due to climate change, while demand increases due to rapid population growth. The GLOWA Jordan River project generates science-based management strategies for maximizing water productivity under global climate change. We use a novel definition of water productivity as the...
1. A positive relationship between seed size and subsequent offspring survival is a key assumption in ecological theory concerning life-history strategies. Yet, this relationship is uncertain in respect to lifetime survival because sound evidence only exists for early seedling stages. Furthermore, the effect of environmental variation in space and...