Our first meeting of an international group of scholars met in Leipzig, Germany in early October. The work is supported by German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig. The project, entitled "sUrBioCity - Deciphering Drivers of Urban Biodiversity across Multiple Scales", aims to understand how urban biodiversity is organized.
"We will develop a theoretical framework for evaluating the local and regional processes shaping biodiversity and community assembly in urban plant and bird assemblages at the taxonomic, functional phylogenetic levels. We will test specific hypothesis on how multiscale environmental drivers (e.g., climate, habitat heterogeneity) interact with species traits and nativity to explain urban species coexistence."
We were happy to welcome PhD candidate Dorothy Borowy from Geography & Environmental Systems, as well as researchers from Spain, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Czechoslovakia, France and the US.
The second meeting is planned for April 2018.