Jürgen Dengler

Jürgen Dengler
Zurich University of Applied Sciences | ZHAW · Institute of Natural Resource Sciences (IUNR)

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil.

About

755
Publications
369,534
Reads
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13,023
Citations
Citations since 2017
373 Research Items
9149 Citations
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Introduction
I am a vegetation ecologist, with excellent species knowledge in the field, who in recent years strongly "invaded" into macroecology and ecoinformatics. My basic research interest are the patterns of biodiversity and their underlying causes, with a special focus on ecological scaling-laws such as species-area relationships. A second research focus is conservation of biodiversity, where I work both on conceptual issues and practical solutions in conservation, management and restoration.
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - May 2022
Zurich University of Applied Sciences
Position
  • Head of Research Group
Description
  • Head of Research Group "Vegetation Ecology" and Senior Lecturer, since 2017-12-12 Professor
May 2017 - June 2017
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig
Position
  • PostDoc Position
Description
  • sMon: Synthesis project on biodiversity monitoring in Germany
April 2017 - present
University of Bayreuth
Position
  • Lecturer
Education
November 2007 - April 2012
University of Hamburg
Field of study
  • Vegetation Ecology and Macroecology
October 1994 - February 2003
April 1991 - June 1994

Publications

Publications (755)
Article
Full-text available
Global patterns of regional (gamma) plant diversity are relatively well known, but whether these patterns hold for local communities, and the dependence on spatial grain, remain controversial. Using data on 170,272 georeferenced local plant assemblages, we created global maps of alpha diversity (local species richness) for vascular plants at three...
Article
Full-text available
Long-term analyses of biodiversity data highlight a ‘biodiversity conservation paradox’: biological communities show substantial species turnover over the past century1,2, but changes in species richness are marginal1,3–5. Most studies, however, have focused only on the incidence of species, and have not considered changes in local abundance. Here...
Article
Full-text available
Aims: To develop a consistent ecological indicator value system for Europe for five of the main plant niche dimensions: soil moisture (M), soil nitrogen (N), soil reaction (R), light (L) and temperature (T). Study area: Europe (and closely adjacent regions). Methods: We identified 31 indicator value systems for vascular plants in Europe that contai...
Article
Full-text available
Question : We explored the error resulting from different methods for recording the cover of plants in vegetation plots, specifically the direct estimation of percent cover vs. the use of ordinal cover scales (7-step Braun-Blanquet and 5-step Hult-Sernander-Du Rietz). Methods : We simulated 121 plant species of different cover, sampled with 13 diff...
Article
Full-text available
Grasslands host a significant share of Europe’s species diversity but are among the most threatened vegetation types of the continent. Resurvey studies can help to understand patterns and drivers of changes in grassland diversity and species composition. However, most resurveys are based on local or regional data, and hardly reach back more than ei...
Article
With this Forum contribution I wish to shed light on the problematic developments in scientific publishing resulting from the strong push of science funders towards gold open access (OA). This has given rise to numerous "predatory" journals, that maximise profit at the expense of scientific quality. With a bibliometric analysis in the field of ecol...
Article
In der Schweiz gibt es 42 eidgenössische Jagdbanngebiete. Ein wichtiges Ziel dieser Gebiete ist der Schutz und die Erhaltung von Säugetieren und Vögeln und ihrer Lebensräume (Verordnung über die eidgenössischen Jagdbanngebiete, Art. 1, Stand 2015). Das Jagdbanngebiet «Graue Hörner» im Kanton St. Gallen bietet vielen Tier- und Pflanzenarten weitgehe...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species' ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, especially across different biomes. We compiled a worldwide collection of long-term permanent vegetati...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Theoretical, experimental and observational studies have shown that biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are influenced by functional community structure through two mutually non‐exclusive mechanisms: (1) the dominance effect (which relates to the traits of the dominant species); and (2) the niche partitioning effect [which re...
Article
Full-text available
After a nomenclatural review of the available names for the order of mesoxeric grasslands within the class Festuco-Brometea, we propose the conservation of the name Brachypodietalia pinnati (with a conserved type) against the names Brometalia erecti and Scorzoneretalia villosae. In syntaxonomic concepts not accepting a single order for the mesoxeri...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents two sampling-event datasets with occurrences of vascular plants, bryophytes and lichens collected in May-June 2021 in southern Ukraine. We aimed to collect high-quality biodiversity data in an understudied region and contribute it to international databases and networks. The study was carried out during the 15th Eurasian Dry Gra...
Article
Full-text available
Ecological theory predicts close relationships between macroclimate and functional traits. Yet, global climatic gradients correlate only weakly with the trait composition of local plant communities, suggesting that important factors have been ignored. Here, we investigate the consistency of climate-trait relationships for plant communities in Europ...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Dear Editors and Editorial Board members, Dear reviewers and authors, Dear colleagues, With this Newsletter relatively shortly after the last one, we do not only want to celebrate the successful completion of Volume 3, but we indeed have also a bunch of other exciting news.
Article
Full-text available
Questions Wet grasslands are among the most threatened habitats in Central Europe and are subject to a loss of their unique species assemblages. Grazing and mowing are important conservation management tools for such semi-natural habitats. The aim of the present study was to investigate and compare the influence of grazing and mowing on the diversi...
Technical Report
Full-text available
It took seven years and hundreds of hours of work by an international team of 34 authors to develop and publish the most comprehensive system of ecological indicator values (EIVs) of vascular plants in Europe to date. EIVE 1.0 is now available as an open access database (https://zenodo.org/record/7534792) and described in the accompanying paper (De...
Article
Full-text available
We report on the completed third volume of Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS). VCS has been included in the Scopus bibliometric database and will receive its first CiteSore in mid-2023. We announce the 2022 Editors’ Award for a paper selected from the four papers nominated for Editors’ Choice during 2022. We selected Liu et al. (2022; Veget...
Article
Full-text available
Aims Ellenberg-type indicator values are expert-based rankings of plant species according to their ecological optima on main environmental gradients. Here we extend the indicator-value system proposed by Heinz Ellenberg and co-authors for Central Europe by incorporating other systems of Ellenberg-type indicator values (i.e., those using scales comp...
Article
Motivation: Indicator values are numerical values used to characterize the ecological niches of species and to estimate their occurrence along gradients. Indicator values on climatic and edaphic niches of plant species have received considerable attention in ecological research, whereas data on the optimal positioning of species along disturbance g...
Article
Full-text available
Temperate grasslands exhibit strong spatial and temporal variation in water regimes. Thus, grassland plants experience potentially stressful water regimes, which may influence their tissue silicon (Si) and nitrogen (N) concentrations. Plant Si and N concentrations play important ecological roles in temperate grasslands, for example, by influencing...
Article
Full-text available
The inneralpine dry valleys of the Swiss Alps are characterized by subcontinental climate, leading to many peculiarities in dry grassland species composition. Despite their well-known uniqueness, comprehensive studies on biodiversity patterns of the dry grasslands in these valleys were still missing. To close this gap, we sampled 161 10-m² vegetati...
Article
Full-text available
Vegetation-plot resurvey data are a main source of information on terrestrial biodiversity change, with records reaching back more than one century. although more and more data from re-sampled plots have been published, there is not yet a comprehensive open-access dataset available for analysis. Here, we compiled and harmonised vegetation-plot resu...
Article
Full-text available
Species abundance distributions (SADs) link species richness with species abundances and are an important tool in the quantitative analysis of ecological communities. Niche based and sample based SAD models predict different spatial scaling properties of SAD parameters. However, empirical research of SAD scaling properties is largely missing. Here,...
Article
Green alder (Alnus viridis) is spreading throughout the Alps due to extensification and abandonment of land use. Consequently, species-rich habitat types are decreasing and nitrogen is ccumulated in the soils because of the tree’s symbiosis with the bacterium Frankia alni. Therefore, in “Graue Hörner” wildlife protection area (canton of St. Gall, S...
Article
Full-text available
With this editorial, we introduce the Special Collection “Classification of grasslands and other open vegetation types in the Palaearctic”. In searching the Web of Science for classification papers on Palaearctic grasslands, we found 207 studies from 1972–2021, including 106 typical classification works. These studies originated mainly from Europe,...
Preprint
Full-text available
Ecological theory posits that temporal stability patterns in plant populations are associated with differences in species’ ecological strategies. However, empirical evidence is lacking about which traits, or trade-offs, underlie species stability, specially across different ecosystems. To address this, we compiled a global collection of long-term p...
Article
Full-text available
Aim: Understanding the variation in community composition and species abundances (i.e., β-diversity) is at the heart of community ecology. A common approach to examine β-diversity is to evaluate directional variation in community composition by measuring the decay in the similarity among pairs of communities along spatial or environmental distance...
Preprint
Full-text available
Vegetation-plot resurvey data are a main source of information on terrestrial biodiversity change, with records reaching back more than one century. Although more and more data from re-sampled plots have been published, there is not yet a comprehensive open-access dataset available for analysis. Here, we compiled and harmonised vegetation-plot resu...
Article
Full-text available
Im September 2021 kamen wieder Dutzende von Freund/-innen der Biodiversität zusammen, um auf dem Campus Grüental aufregende Entdeckungen zu machen. Mittels sieben verschiedener Kartiergruppen konnte die Gesamtartenliste auf 740 Arten erweitert werden. Wir können nur davon träumen, welche Tier- oder Pflanzenarten wir bei der nächsten Durchführung im...
Article
1. Niche filtering predicts that abundant species in communities have similar traits that are suitable for the environment. However, niche filtering can operate on distinct axes of trait variation in response to different ecological conditions. Here, we use a trait-based approach to infer niche filtering processes and (1) test if abundant and rare...
Article
Full-text available
Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids do not reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions occur and most terrestrial species reside. Here, we...
Article
Full-text available
Aim The first comprehensive checklist of European phytosociological alliances, orders and classes (EuroVegChecklist) was published by Mucina et al. (2016, Applied Vegetation Science , 19 (Suppl. 1), 3–264). However, this checklist did not contain detailed information on the distribution of individual vegetation types. Here we provide the first maps...
Article
Analysing temporal patterns in plant communities is extremely important to quantify the extent and the consequences of ecological changes, especially considering the current biodiversity crisis. Long‐term data collected through the regular sampling of permanent plots represent the most accurate resource to study ecological succession, analyse the s...
Article
Full-text available
The 15th EDGG Field Workshop took place from 24 May to 3 June 2021 in Southern Ukraine (Kherson and Mykolaiv administrative regions). Over 10 days, we sampled different types of grasslands, mainly focusing on dry grasslands of the classes Festuco-Brometea, Koelerio-Corynephoretea canescentis, and Festuco-Puccinellietea (steppic, sandy and saline, r...