How Are the Plants Doing?

: Bruelheide: What we observe is that very often species richness doesn't change. You go there and we might find exactly 25 species on ten meters squared, as we did as I did 30 years ago. The interesting point is that the species are different.

00:00:14: Jandt: Now we see that on this local scale, the specialist species specialist for specific habitats, they are lost in some plots, not in all the plots. And we get some generalist species which occur in more and more plots, so they get more dominant. And we have these homogenization effects in nearly all habitats.

00:00:36: Hahn: Welcome to Inside Biodiversity. This podcast is hosted by iDiv, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. My name is Volker Hahn. I am head of the impact unit at iDiv. My guests today are Ute Jandt and Helge Bruelheide. Both are plant ecologists at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and at iDiv. Their expertise lies in plant biodiversity, vegetation change and ecosystem functioning. Enjoy this conversation with Ute and Helge. You both are botanists. You studied plants. Why plants? Why not animals?

00:01:15: Jandt: That's very easy. They can't run away.

00:01:18: Hahn: Okay, so for research, that makes it easier.

00:01:21: Bruelheide: Yeah, absolutely. But I think there's probably maybe an emotional part to it. Yes.

00:01:25: Jandt: We love plants, of course. Um, and in my case, it's, um. I could not remember animals so well. So to remember the, the, the songs of birds was really difficult for me. I don't have a good, um, acoustic memory. And this is not so important for the plants.

00:01:44: Hahn: Do you have a favorite plant species or favorite favorite ecosystem?

00:01:50: Jandt: Yes, of course there are many plants and ecosystems are like. So for my research, I mainly focus on grasslands and on especially on dry grasslands. But I also like very much. Mountain grasslands. So they are of course, they have a high biodiversity. They smell good, which is also important to me. And yes, they they are always nice. The whole year.

00:02:12: Bruelheide: So it is very thermophilic. She loves the heat and, uh, to be on the dry. Grassland at this time of the year. When? Temperatures above 30°C and the slope has 20 degrees and a sudden exposed. That's her habitat. I'm very fond of the laurophyllous subtropical forest. That's not well known, but in former times it has covered most of our planet. So that was in the tertiary, in the Eocene, and even in Germany we had this type of forest. And nowadays we only have some remnants, like on the Canary Islands. And the biggest remnant is in China, where we work a lot. And this is a Very ancient forests with old families. Very interesting trees. Which is different from the sap from the tropical humid rainforest, because we have also trees that lose their leaves over winter. Um, so very special habitat type, but very old and very ancient. Impressive.

00:03:21: Hahn: When we talk about biodiversity change and plant change. Let us first talk about the quantity of plants. There's a phenomenon called global greening. And it's the observation that the Earth has become greener. Can you elaborate on that? Where is this happening and how is it happening? Is it more trees than weeds as it used to be, or is it areas that were not covered by plants before and now are covered? How exactly is this phenomenon playing out?

00:03:51: Jandt: So in general, I think this is you have to imagine we are sitting in a greenhouse and everything is more warm, more wet and humid. So that's where plants grow better. So that's I think we have here the the effect of climate change, where the Earth is the greenhouse and everything is growing better. I have observed that, for example, a group of plants which are not so often looked at the bryophytes, they also increase very much in the last years, especially in our temperate climate.

00:04:22: Hahn: They are mosses, right?

00:04:24: Jandt: Mosses and also liverworts. So both the mosses and the bryophytes, they have the ability to just grow and do photosynthesis when it's warm enough and when they have water so they don't have to wait during winter for spring, but they can just continue growth when it's warm enough. And that's what what's happening at the moment with our more mild winters in Germany and in temperate Europe, we have mild winters and sufficient water for them so that they can grow. And they. They spread very much so in my favorite ecosystems, the dry grasslands, I can see that the open space which usually is there, which is, um, in dry grasslands, which are dry and some are occupied very often by annual plants, these are now beginning to be occupied also by the bryophytes, because they can grow in winter. And then there is no more space for the animal species.

00:05:17: Hahn: Maybe a similar phenomenon is also happening closer to the poles because it's getting warmer. There's also more where maybe the glaciers retire. There's plants coming in a new land that used to be barren is is also covered.

00:05:32: Bruelheide: Yeah, we see that. We see that on the permanent plots, um, in the tundra that they get more shrubby, they get taller. That means there is more biomass in the end, it means they get greener. We see the same with our alpine belts globally. So the vegetation belts are, Um, creeping up the mountains. So in overall this gives a greater area with plant biomass. But the main point here is that we have also, um, increased the woody biomass. So there's a lot of plantations going on, which is uh, accounting for this increasing greenness. And this is not always good for biodiversity. As long as there are only monocultures planted it might not be beneficial.

00:06:23: Jandt: And I would like to add also that this is not really, uh, everything is getting greener. So we also have parts on the earth where desertification is happening, like you can see in central Spain, for example, there's large areas where plants are not getting greener, but where they dry out and where nothing is growing anymore.

00:06:43: Hahn: So it's it's a complex, uh, picture. And there are also different drivers, like the ones you mentioned. Also, CO2 fertilization plays a role in nitrogen fertilization in many places. Longer vegetation periods that have to do with with climate change as well. And Helge, you mentioned those tree monocultures. Sometimes they are planted for climate mitigation because they're supposed to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere. But as you say, it's like this is really then a trade off between protecting climate and protecting biodiversity. And so my question would be, how can we reconcile those, those trade offs? And can we do the same with more biodiverse plantations.

00:07:30: Bruelheide: Exactly. So this is exactly the problem. When we had this discussion on global tree plantations, there was a group of authors pointing out that we could do tree plantations in a lot of our natural grasslands, and that would be a disaster because the grasslands are much richer in species. Also, specific species you wouldn't find in the forests. And, um. This means, in this case, the planting trees would, um, opposing increasing biodiversity. And the same is true if you only plant monocultures. So we have globally, uh, huge plantations of eucalypt species where you find virtually nothing in the herb layer below and not other trees. And the same is true in particular for China, where they have maybe five tree species that are used for plantations. And yes, it's for climate mitigation, but these plantations are mostly monocultures. So our recommendation, and we have done research also in China is to plant mixtures, which has several advantages. On the one hand you would support biodiversity. And then this trade off you've mentioned would disappear. And on the other hand, you would also increase the productivity of the plantations, because we know that mixtures grow better than monocultures on the same area and on the same soil conditions and same climate. So there are many possibilities to reconcile the climate actions and the biodiversity actions. And in fact, it's a quite simple approach. Just let's increase diversity.

00:09:16: Jandt: And what is very often forgotten is when you have a plantation. Let's take the example of the eucalypt. You don't look at the soils. So in the soil of a eucalypt plantation there is basically no organic matter. It doesn't accumulate so the leaves fall down. They form a litter layer which doesn't decompose. It's hostile to any other plants that can't. They can't settle there. They can't germinate and grow. And there's not much in the soil, so no accumulation. Even if you have an older plantation, there's no organic matter in the soil. And this is, of course, not very good for the carbon balance, which you want to promote with such a plantation. And then also the trees that are cut. So you lose all the beneficial effect of climate buffering or whatever you have in mind when you do a forest plantation and when they are cut, then this carbon storage is lost again. So I don't see really the point in having such monoculture plantations.

00:10:21: Bruelheide: May I add, what we always forget is that when we plant trees in a plantation, that two thirds of the climate mitigation impact is increasing the soil carbon content and not the above ground biomass we are going to harvest, as you said, that means to have at the same time, a fertile and healthy soil is equally important than increasing the background biomass, so unhealthy soil will accumulate as it is had more carbon. And this is maybe the best way to, um, adjust the carbon mitigation potential.

00:11:02: Hahn: Okay, there's a lot of debate about these carbon offsets and carbon credits. The take home is that there are trade offs, and it's possible to reconcile them by if you want to grow a forest, try to do it with more species, do it more in a diverse way, and maybe less you could.

00:11:20: Bruelheide: Have may add one more aspect the insurance hypothesis. So you don't as in the stock market, you know, you do not put all your money on a single stock. You're trying to diversify your portfolio. And this is the same answer with trees. Let's assume we have an ongoing climate change, and there will be more drought periods in the future or there will be floodings then. It's really good to have a mixture of trees that include species that either sustain drought or sustain flooding or other conditions that might be there. And this is a typical thing. If you have a mixture, the requirements of the species, their ecological niches will differ. That means you have covered a higher potential range of conditions where they can grow in a mixture. So a monoculture is always very specific and only a little thing might happen like pathogen outbreak or drought. And it's gone. Yeah. So, um, it's not safe. Much safer to plant a plantation because mixtures.

00:12:27: Jandt: May I add something else?

00:12:29: Hahn: We need to get to the next point. So real quick.

00:12:32: Jandt: I want to add that these plantations, they increasingly also use exotic, uh, not exotic species, for example, from North America or which are other species which are thought to be more climate adapted than our native species. Of course this can be done, and plantations are perfect. Experiment to plant such species and find out whether they are better suited to our climate, which is changing. But I want to say that it's important to keep the nature reserves, nature conservation reserves areas without such such species, because they are also important for protecting our native vegetation, and they should not be mixed in these experiments.

00:13:15: Hahn: Okay, so we have talked about how planting forests and how climate change can increase the amount of biomass on the planet. Now let's talk about diversity is with more plant biomass. Is the planet also becoming more plant diverse?

00:13:34: Bruelheide: Oh, that's a very good question. The best and first answer is it's a matter of scale. So it depends whether we look at the total planet that we can say that we are losing plants. It's not that severe. As for example, for bird species where we have lost mean by about 20% in the last 500 years of all our bird species, they are globally extinct. So the global extinction of plant species is estimated to be around 600 700 plants out of 400,000. So it's not it's not that much globally. And on the other hand, we also have the so-called biodiversity paradox. So we are observing the change on vegetation and wood. And I we are doing this with many, many colleagues on, on certain plots, on areas that say of ten by 10 or 2 by two meters squared. And what we observe is that very often species richness doesn't change.

00:14:36: Hahn: So species richness, that's the number of species in that plot?

00:14:40: Bruelheide: Exactly. Yeah. You go there. Um. And we are just doing this. Um, in three weeks from now, going with students to the places where I did my PhD in the Hearts Mountain meadows, and we might find exactly 25 species on ten meter squared as we did as I did 30 years ago. The interesting point is that the species are different now. So it's not only the species number, but we find certain species that have increased. Very often the same species increased in very different plots while we are losing species that are specific to some habitats. And this can be summarized under the term homogenization. The word becomes more similar. That means on this scale we are not losing plant diversity, but we are losing, um, more different habitat types. So at the global losing at the local scale, we're not that much losing. And interesting is the scale in between. So when you go to hectares or regions like um, the council here of Heller or a federal state in Germany, whatever, then you find there is a lot of change going on. We are losing a lot of species locally and regionally. Yeah. Because, um, the habitats have simply gone. So in principle, the answer is are we losing plant species. Depends on the scale. But it certainly happens in particular at these intermediate scales.

00:16:19: Jandt: We have several approaches to uh, to find out about these changes at the local scale, which we do in vegetation plots. As Helge said, we see that on this local scale, the specialist species for specialists, for specific habitats. They are getting more rare or so. They are lost in some plots. Not in all the plots, but in some. And we get some generalist species which occur in more and more plots, so they get more dominant. And they we have these homogenization effects in nearly all habitats.

00:16:56: Hahn: But are these all native species also the generalist species, or are there also non-native species coming in and replacing native species?

00:17:07: Bruelheide: It depends.

00:17:08: Jandt: We have some habitats where which are very prone to be invaded by invasive species. We had here in Hull one person, Victoria Wagner. She has worked a lot on which habitats are more invaded and which less. And so she has found that disturbed habitats are more prone to to be invaded. So some invasive species are really a problem for habitats, but others just are there and they don't disrupt the habitat integrity. Or maybe the habitat is still species rich and could be seen as a stable habitat. So some species are a problem and some some are.

00:17:44: Hahn: Really.

00:17:45: Jandt: Really.

00:17:45: Hahn: Deep species.

00:17:46: Jandt: Yeah, it's species specific and habitat specific. So the vegetation databases have broad range of vegetation plots. But for the people who look at the invasive species, it is just a very small subset of these plots which they can use to study the invasive species because they are not so many in the vegetation databases, and they are also not everywhere.

00:18:10: Bruelheide: However, the general picture for plants is a bit different than for animals and animals. We have huge changes brought about by invasive species in the plants. We have that, as you said, in certain habitat types. But among the main drivers that drive biodiversity change in vegetation, invasive plant species would rank Last of all the different drivers. So what we see at the moment is that other drivers like the land use change. You know, you simply stop mowing a meadow and it becomes a shrubland. And in the end the forest will completely change the biodiversity. This is a big driver. Then we have pollution. Pollution also includes eutrophication. You know, if you put a lot of fertilizer on a bog, for example, you will destroy the bog immediately. Then we have also, as an important driver, the extraction of material. Yeah. So simply cutting a forest, even if it remains a forest after you have harvested the timber, will destroy biodiversity. And then we have climate change. And number five would be invasive species. So we rarely see that invasive species have completely outcompeted the native ones. And we have also to see that in the global context with climate change We will also have native species. Let's see. Species native to Germany taking over habitats in which they have not been before.

00:19:42: Hahn: So they're moving north and moving to colder places.

00:19:46: Bruelheide: They're moving north, but they're native somehow, or they have occurred in different habitats. So, um, a colleague of us, France, has called this the neo natives, you know, so the new natives which will come and this makes it that blurs a bit, the picture between the exotic ones, non-native ones and the native ones, and the mechanisms are the same. We cannot say that we don't have, um, very good colonizers among our native species. You know, it's a similar problem, and every farmer knows that. So the main weeds we have on our elbow fields, which we have to fight, are native ones. It's not that we are all threatened by aliens only.

00:20:24: Jandt: But I would like to object to your statement that the alien, the invasive and alien or exotic are not problematic. So there are some places and some habitats and some invasive species which are really bad for the natural habitats. For example, at the coast, Atlantic coast, in France, in Portugal there is this Carpobrotus, which is like a succulent and it is resistant to drought and it is really overthrowing all the natural systems.

00:20:55: Hahn: It was brought there by humans.

00:20:58: Bruelheide: Yes. It was brought for ornamental reasons as most of these species from this family.

00:21:04: Jandt: This is one example. And for example, in some river beds we only have the invasive. Um, I forgot the name.

00:21:13: Bruelheide: It's the Japanese knotweed. Okay. We have these cases. We also have uh, in particular along the rivers. We have stands that are pure invasive ones. And yes, of course there is not growing anything else. But remember this, uh, student course we did in Portugal, where we compared the dunes with and without Carpobrotus. So this plant, the invasive plant from South Africa, no difference in species richness. Now it depends a bit on the scale where the plant is growing. Nothing else can grow. And of course it's a competitor. But if you look at larger scales, in this case three by 3 or 10 by ten meters, you wouldn't see the difference.

00:21:53: Jandt: But I have found exactly this species over growing. One very specific endemic Limonium species Limonium auriculifoium. And in Portugal also it is very, very locally directly competing with the native flora which was overgrown and which would have gone extinct if I hadn't taken out the Carpobrotus.

00:22:15: Hahn: I discussed this in an earlier episode with Martin Winter, where I asked, well, if you didn't know that this is a non-native species because you're not familiar with that area of the world. It could be a native species as well. And how why would you value this very successful plant species? Why has it less value? Only because it's non-native.

00:22:44: Bruelheide: We come back to the homogenization problem. This particular plant in the dunes, Carpobrotus, now has invaded all the dunes in the whole Mediterranean. And of course, dunes in Greece are different from those in Italy or Spain or Portugal or France. But in these stretches you find now this plant species everywhere and calculating now the floristic differences between the different dunes, which show that they have become more similar because of this one species going everywhere. And you're right, of course, it could also have been a native plant species, but many of our non-native successful invaders. They have particular traits we don't see in our native flora. In this case, um, the Carpobrotus has the ability also to switch to the so-called Crassulaceae acid metabolism, which saves a lot of water, and the Cam metabolism is not that much represented in our dunes with native species. So it makes it very successful because it's drought tolerant. And this is a trait that might help, you know, so it might easily also happen with native species. But very often we see this very different rates to the native residents and the exotic species. So that makes them probably the more successful colonizers.

00:24:16: Jandt: We have an example in the native vegetation and native flora in the grasslands of Bromus erectus, which is a grass species and which has the ability to form a dominant stance and where it produces without land use, a lot of litter, and this litter inhibits germination of other species, and it also covers what is on the ground so that the species can become dominant and have no other competitors at the end. In the same stance. So it also.

00:24:47: Hahn: Happens.

00:24:47: Bruelheide: That's a native.

00:24:47: Jandt: Species, a native species. So there is a debate whether how whether it is really native to all Central Europe. But I think yes.

00:24:57: Bruelheide: But we see it in our vegetation, um, with surveys that this plant was not that frequent and not that, um, abundant before. Uh, and nowadays it's increasing in cover and it's reappearing in plots where it has not been there been before. And this is true for many, many different dry grassland types, from the mesophilic ones to the very dry ones. It's a very successful species at the moment, and actually we don't know exactly why. As I said before, it might be land use change. Less cheap grazing on these plots. It might be eutrophication. So it's certainly benefiting from higher nitrogen input. And it might be also climate change. We don't know.

00:25:40: Jandt: So what we see is that there's a lot of vegetation change going on for different reasons. Helge, you mentioned the most important drivers. And one phenomenon that we have is that in parts of the world, especially in Europe, there is land abandonment. Land that was formerly used for agriculture is now abandoned and wildlife comes back. And this is something that I discussed in the previous episode with Carlo Nannini when we talked about mammals. And his message was that if we leave space for wilderness, then the mammals come back. Would this also apply to plans that if we give up agriculture then nature comes back? My question, I guess, would be is that a good idea to give land back to nature? Or isn't it rather the case that if we use land, we might also have very species rich ecosystems like orchids, like hay meadows, like traditional wood pastures? All of these ecosystems are shaped by humans for agricultural reasons, and they're very rich in species. So it's this land sparing versus land sharing debate. And with the mammals, at least Colorado clearly said, well, spare land for nature. How do you see this for plants?

00:27:12: Hahn: I would say we need, of course, both. We need to spare some land. And we already have this system in Europe with the Natura 2000 network that we spare. The sites where rare or protectable habitats occur. And of course, we also have to diversify the land we use so to make it more sustainable. So if you talk about farming land, this can also be more diverse than it is at the moment. Of course, then the farmers would have to accept that maybe some unwanted plants would be in their crop fields, but that would tremendously increase the connectivity of all the natural systems we have. If these huge amounts of area we have currently cultivated with these monocultures, they were just allowed to be a bit more species rich than this was, would connect this bad land we have protected. And of course, you mentioned these orchards and other rich systems. They would be, of course, the first to be abandoned. But that's not fair. So I think it would be more effective to go really to those systems where the land use is also economically important to also diversify those, and not only those which are already in quite good condition.

00:28:33: Bruelheide: But can we have it all at the same time, because the farmers, they want to get rid of the weeds to get higher yields from the field, and if you allow for more weeds, then you will need more land to get the same yields. So you would actually not spare land, but you would share land with nature. One can argue for both, but I'm skeptical of whether we can have both at the same time.

00:28:59: Jandt: I'm quite convinced that we must have both at the same time. On the one hand, we have our very rare and highly protected habitat types, which you cannot simply let let go. So they are protected for some reasons because they are unique. We have also a global responsibility for these habitat types, because otherwise the species in them would disappear. And we have this wonderful network and protected areas in the Natura 2000 sites. And I think there is no debate to give this up. This is the first point, but this is maybe 3% of our terrestrial area. We are not talking about the the majority of these areas. Then we have these ideas of rewilding areas that have been intensively used before, which also, in my opinion, is a very, very good idea because it would add.

00:29:54: Hahn: So rewilding means leaving that abandoned landscape to nature to regrow and not interfere very much.

00:30:02: Bruelheide: Rewilding also means that you have to introduce the keystone species. It's not that you simply make a fence around 500 hectares and look what happens. You have also to put some big herbivores into that.

00:30:15: Hahn: So the European bison.

00:30:17: Bruelheide: Bison would be a wonderful idea. Also, the wild horses would be an idea. Also, some types of cattle would be a good idea and maybe also admit the predators. So let them go in like the wolves and the lynx. They certainly works well. And we know that even species that have been adapted to human land use, like mowing and meadows, have a chance also to grow in these areas. That does not mean we would save our, let's say, lowland hay meadows as a habitat type, which we have to do. This is a European law that we have to do that. But it would mean that some of the species would also find their place there. So nothing wrong with rewilding. And then on top of that, we have now the demand also to do more for biodiversity on the majority of the terrestrial land. We are talking about the new nature restoration law, the European law aiming at, um, protecting or not protecting, but restoring biodiversity.

00:31:27: Jandt: And 30% of the terrestrial area.

00:31:29: Bruelheide: Yeah, making 30% of the terrestrial area available for, um, priority for biodiversity. And we cannot do that by doing restrictive nature reserves on all of them. This means this is an area we have to talk about land sharing, and we are not talking about the remaining 70%, which might be still intensively used. And then the question is, is it possible to make a living for the farmer on these areas and at the same time protecting biodiversity? And you said, yes, we have to accept that we will have a reduction in productivity, so we will have a lower yield in vain, for example, in the wheat field, because we might have more wheat there. But if we accept that, we could reconcile also biodiversity protection. At the same time, we retain productivity. And I come back to the insurance hypothesis if we do that, and let's say we grow certain grain varieties that are more drought resistant, or we even mix varieties on these shared plots, we decrease the planting density, we allow more weeds and the more weeds. We also would have more ground beetles, and they are, um, very positive in, um, in fighting the, um, pathogens in these, in these fields. So it would be, it would be very beneficial at lower general yield, but in the end, with a higher stability in yield over all the years, taking all the drought and the wet years that might happen. So that means these shared areas might provide a chance to also increase the yield stability in Germany and Europe as a whole.

00:33:26: Jandt: I want to add that there are different concepts for rewilding. So one the most commonly known is that just abandon everything and then nature will help itself. But there's also the concept that you have help the rewilding for example, by transforming monocultures into the natural forest again. So if you have a pine forest plantation, very often you can find the native forest trees on the ground vegetation. So if you carefully take out the non-native trees, the nature can help itself then later. But you have to first take care that these pine forests are not, um, sustained by the current use, but that you take out the non not wanted trees until biodiversity establish itself from where it still is. This applies to pine forest. Maybe also to. You can do this in places where oak forest would be native and so on. So different possibilities for rewilding exists. So you don't have to just take land which is in some farm use or something, but you can also go to some other systems where rewilding is possible.

00:34:41: Hahn: This leads me to the next question. We've talked about what forestry can do for plant diversity and for native species. And we've talked about what what agriculture can do and what can we do with the land that is abundant. For the listeners of this podcast. What can individuals do for plant diversity or to help plants do better?

00:35:08: Bruelheide: So as long as you have an own garden, you can do a lot. So many of the gardens in Germany. They look like a desert. Yeah. So they put either gravel on the ground to have as few green cover as possible. For me, it always looks like a graveyard. Are they by the typical greenery from the next market and have all the plant species the neighbors have? The best idea would maybe to let also something grow. You know, to have your corners where nothing is happening. And this is not promoting only the plant species. So if you have some open ground, you will have the sand bees coming in. You will have, um, other insects as well. You will have other pollinators. You will enjoy the butterflies. So simply do a bit less intensive work. Have some corners where you don't mow the lawn every two weeks, so that would help a lot. And of course, in particular, don't start buying an automatic lawn mower that kills all the hedgehogs at night. So all this is, um, something to do to do less. Less intensive use of anything is one of the big recommendations we did in our German biodiversity assessment, where over 120 experts were discussing what can we do in Germany? And the answer is so simple. In the end, we need also habitats that are less intensively used. And this is true for our garden. This is true for the public. Green. Yeah, all the parks could be mown less and we could have these corners everywhere. And it's also true for agriculture. We need areas where that are less intensively used. That would solve a lot of our problems.

00:37:00: Jandt: I think there are many things that people can do. One is also that they don't see the plants outside only as decoration, but as really important system which sustains our life. So the forest is not only there for walking and walking the dog, but also for buffering our climate and for the reproduction of the air. So the forest is there for for the climate buffering and for the oxygen production and for cleaning the air, not only for walking dogs. And another thing I want to add is that we don't have to think only in our to about our own backyard, but we have to also consider the broad landscape. So what you eat also has a big impact on on the food production, for example. So if you buy products which are produced with sustainable agriculture, this helps nature a lot.

00:37:58: Hahn: So my last question is what would you like the audience to remember from this conversation.

00:38:07: Bruelheide: Plants are great. The world is changing and we have to observe it, and in many cases also to take certain measures to keep this wonderful plant world.

00:38:23: Jandt: I would like people to remember that plants are the basis of our life, and that it would be maybe worth to look at them a bit closer, and to know more about plants, and to learn where they are and how they are and how they live.

00:38:39: Hahn: And one option to do that is to use modern smartphone apps like Flora Incognita, where you can identify a species that you don't know, and then it can even be used for scientific purposes. And I will put a link in the show notes. Thank you both very much for this wonderful conversation.

00:38:58: Bruelheide: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe! Inside Biodiversity is available on all major podcast streaming platforms.