PhD student Kadri Koorem participated in expedition to Iceland in August 2011. This expedition joined the PhD students from the fields of geology, geography, zoology, marine biology and botany. During three weeks the students lived in the tents, worked in the field and experienced the true entity of Iceland’s nature. Description of the expedition (and some pictures) are available in Estonian.

Seminar of Plant Ecology Lab was held on February 15-17 in Pärnu. Newest, currently unpublished results and new ideas for future research were discussed. In addition to members of Plant Ecology Lab, collaborating members from Macroecology workgroup, Plant Evolutionary Ecology workgroup and Working Group Ecosystem Research participated in the seminar. 

Annika Uibopuu, Mari Moora, Maarja Öpik and Martin Zobel published a paper addressing the effect of different arbuscular-mycorrhizal (AM) communities on plant growth. It is known that forest management can lead to differences in AM fungal communities in young and old forests regarding both diversity and abundance of AM fungi. In current paper the authors show that differences in natural AM communities can also lead to different effect on growth of herbaceous species of forest understorey- plants growing with AM communities characteristic to old forests were significantly larger than plants growing with AM communities characteristic to young forests. Plant communities response to forest management intensity can therefore be mediated by mycorrhizal interactions. Read more.