Congratulations for the completion of the PhD

Max Schuchardt (Chair of Disturbance Ecology, University of Bayreuth) successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Bayreuth on 15 December 2022. In his dissertation within the SUSALPS project, Max Schuchardt was able to show that all subalpine plant species adapt to the experimentally manipulated climate changes ('climate tracking') by starting leaf development as well as flowering earlier. Max was also able to show that investment in reproductive organs increased with a rise in temperature - as long as enough precipitation was available to the plant. In another part of his thesis, Max was able to show a temporal lag between losses of native upland species and colonisation of new lowland species, indicating that direct environmental filtering (warming & drought) rather than assumed biotic competition dominates temporal grassland dynamics.