Forest biodiversity and conservation in the Heilmann-Clausen Group

Temperate forest biodiversity
The research combine field based sampling of multitaxa biodiversity with manipulative experiments to understand drivers of biodiversity in temperate forests and in the forest-open land gradient. The research is applied to guide conservation and for developing sustainable forest management.

Open-ended conservation
Traditional conservation often focus on specific species or ecosystem stages as targets. This is practical, but may be counterproductive in a changing world. Nature is not static, and baselines for conservation success is often set in cultural landscapes which are far from natural, and may be costly or impossible to maintain in a time of global change. A shift to open-ended conservation goals is hence timely, but also challenging. We combine multitaxa and ecological monitoring to understand biodiversity patterns and processes in the ecotone from forests to open land, under the impact of herbivores and hydrology, with the aim to guide recovery of natural ecosystems in the Anthropocene.

Citizen science for biodiversity
Involving the public in biodiversity research and monitoring may not be the most cost effective way to collect data. We investigate how citizen science can supplement targeted sampling, and to which degree it may have a democratic and educational perspective, empowering participants to be active in local conservation efforts.

Fungal macroecology and biogeography
Fungal biogeography and trait-evolution is hugely understudied, limiting our understanding on how fungal diversity have evolved over time, and how it may respond to future global change. By analysing standardized field data and more noisy data from citizen science projects, we investigate fungal biodiversity patterns in Denmark and Europe focussing on traits, fungal-host networks and traditional biodiversity metrics.