Recent issue of „Science“ publishes  another debate about the relationship of productivity and plant species richness, which involves also researchers from our lab. A global dataset, which was published in Science in July, demonstrates that plant richness is biggest at intermediate productivity and decreases in high and low productivity. In the current issue, Treddnick et al. propose that using other methods to analyze this dataset, the relationship becomes weaker. Pither et al., including  Martin Zobel, Mari Moora and Kadri Koorem from our lab, therefore argue that the relationship as such still holds when analyzed differently and taht this is a highly important piece of evidence for this long-argued topic.

On January 24-27th, the teams of Plant Ecology and Macroecology organised a workshop on „Dark diversity of co-occurring arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and host plants„. The workshop had 14 participants, including eight international participants from seven countries and six local participants from the Department of Botany. The workshop included discussions and empirical data analyses on how the application of concepts of dark diversity and species pool would improve understanding the biodiversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal fungi and its relationships with diversity of host plants. The workshop was funded by New Phytologist Trust. See more at https://www.newphytologist.org/workshops and in Twitter #16NPW.

A new research fellow Inga Hiiesalu has joined the Plant Ecology Lab. Inga finished her PhD studies at the Macroecology workgroup at UT and after her post-doctoral research at the Czech Academy of Sciences she returned to join the Plant Ecology Lab. She will be examining the diversity patterns of AM fungi and host plants along altitudinal gradients in the arid Himalayas.