Dr. Anne Kempel

I am a community ecologist interested in the factors that maintain biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Particularly, my work focusses on how biotic interactions, such as between plants and their enemies or mutualists, contribute to biodiversity maintenance, the distribution of plant species and the functioning of ecosystems, and how such interactions vary along abiotic or biotic gradients. My research combines experimental field and laboratory studies to investigate these questions at both large and small spatial scales.

Recently, I have also become interested in insect monitoring using novel techniques such as automated insect cameras to better understand how insect communities change across space and time.

Keywords: plant population and community ecology, global change ecology, biodiversity research, plant herbivore interactions, plant pathogen interactions, biotic interactions, plant abundance, invasive species, conservation

Together with Eric Allen from the University of Bern I am leading the global research network BugNet. BugNet has the aim to better understand the impact of plant consumers, such as invertebrate herbivores and fungal pathogens, on plant communities and ecosystem functioning. Moreover, BugNet investigates whether and how the impact of consumers change across a range of different ecosystems and environmental variables. This is important if we are to understand and predict how global change drivers, such as climate and land use change, will alter our ecosystems in the future. More information can be found here: bug-net.org

If you are interested in biodiversity, community ecology, climate and global change, biotic interactions or conservation and you would like to do a Bachelor or Master Project in our group, then get in touch with me! There are always possibilities within our BugNet Experiments, but also other interesting topics.

Below are a few examples of potential topics, but get in touch to get the most up to date possibilities: 

Impact of plant consumers on plant community composition
Plant consumers such as insects, molluscs and fungal pathogens can strongly affect plant communities. According to the growth-defense tradeoff hypothesis they might shift communities towards slow-growing,  more defended species. Taking advantage of a consumer exclusion experiment in Davos you will test this hypothesis by measuring plant functional traits of alpine plant species and relating them to the shift in plant cover in response to the treatments. 

Plant phenology in response to warming
Warming might strongly change plant flower phenology, moreover the presence of aboveground consumers might additionally affect flowering. You will investigate effects of warming  and aboveground consumer removal on phenology in an experimental setup with warming chambers and consumer exclusion to shed light on the combined effects of global change drivers (warming and defaunation). 

Soil feedback-experiment
I am currently looking for one or two students who would like to investigate how the interaction of alpine tree species with soil microbiota change with climate and the addition of nitrogen, a major global change driver. You would perform a common garden soil-feedback experiment in an alpine botanical garden in Davos, and/or a field experiment in a famous, long-running experiment, the Stillberg afforestation, to test the hypothesis that soil microbes are more mutualistic or less pathogenic at harsh environmental conditions.

I am also very interested in rare plant species and finding answer of why some species are rare and endangered, while others are common. In particular, I am interested whether biotic interactions with herbivores or pathogens can also drive rarity. We can think of a project in these lines, and assess e.g. herbivore damage or pathogen infestation in pairs of related common and rare plant species in the Alps.