Martin Zobel, Mari Moora, David Garcia de Leon, Guillermo Bueno, Maret Gerz and Lena Neuenkamp participated in the 58th Symposium of the International Association of Vegetation Science in Brno, Czech Republic, in 19th-24^th of July. Under the topic „Understanding broad-scale vegetation patterns“ David, Guillermo, Maret and Lena presented in their talks how occurrence and distribution of soil organisms, in particular mycorrhizal fungi, can affect plants realized niche and plant community structure during ecosystem succession. The titles of their talks were the following: „Does mycorrhizal symbiosis affect plants´realized niche?“ (Maret Gerz); „European distribution of mycorrhizal types and statuses: does data meet theory?“ (Guillermo Bueno); „Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and ecosystem restoration: A local and global perspective“ (Lena Neuenkamp); „Secondary succession in alvar grasslands – How do plant and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities covary?“ (David Garcia de Leon).  

Read more from Lena's blog post about the conference.

On July 17^th 2015 the following paper where our working group members Martin Zobel and Mari Moora participated was published in Science:

Fraser LH, Pither J, Jentsch A, Sternberg M, Zobel M, Askarizadeh D, Bartha S, Beierkuhnlein C, Bennett JA, Bittel A, Boldgiv B, Boldrini II, Bork E, Brown L, Cabido M, Cahill J, Carlyle CN, Campetella G, Chelli S, Cohen O, Csergo A-M, Díaz S, Enrico L, Ensing D, Fidelis A, Fridley JD, Foster B, Garris H, Goheen JR, Henry HAL, Hohn M, Jouri MH, Klironomos J, Koorem K, Lawrence-Lodge R, Long R, Manning P, Mitchell R, Moora M, Müller SC, Nabinger C, Naseri K, Overbeck GE, Palmer TM, Parsons S, Pesek M, Pillar VD, Pringle RM, Roccaforte K, Schmidt A, Shang Z, Stahlmann R, Stotz GC, Sugiyama S, Szentes S, Thompson D, Tungalag R, Undrakhbold S, van Rooyen M, Wellstein C, Wilson JB, Zupo T. Worldwide evidence of a unimodal relationship between productivity and plant species richness. Science 349: 302-305.  

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