Université de Sherbrooke
Ph.D. candidate
Supervisor: John William (Bill) Shipley
Éric Garnier, Université Montpellier 2
Start: 2012-09-01
End: 2016-01-15

Project

Characterisation of grasslands’ plant species abundance and distribution using plant functional traits
The specific objectives of my project will be to i) determine if there exist trade-offs (mediated through functional traits) for plant species between productivity and abundance in the grasslands of France, ii) quantitatively characterize the relationships between environmental variables and plant traits, iii) use these relations, within different statistical models, to determine the assembly rules of the french grasslands, and iv) refine the use of the CATS (community assembly by trait selection) model, which allows one to predict community assembly with plant functional traits. My project is integrated in the framework of the DIVGRASS project in France (complete description of DIVGRASS available through the CESAB website; www.cesab.org).

Keywords

plant biodiversity, community assembly, grassland, functional traits, environmental effects, primary productivity

Publications

1- Invertebrate herbivory increases along an experimental gradient of grassland plant diversity
Loranger, Hannah, Wolfgang W. Weisser, Anne Ebeling, Till Eggers, Enrica Luca, Jessy Loranger, Christiane Roscher, Sebastian T. Meyer
2013 Oecologia

2- Functionally and phylogenetically diverse plant communities key to soil biota
Milcu, Alexandru, Eric Allan, Christiane Roscher, Tania Jenkins, Sebastian T. Meyer, Dan Flynn, Holger Bessler, François Buscot, Christof Engels, Marlén Gubsch, Stephan König, Annett Lipowsky, Jessy Loranger, Carsten Renker, Christoph Scherber, Bernhard Schmid, Elisa Thébault, Tesfaye Wubet, Wolfgang W. Weisser, Stefan Scheu, Nico Eisenhauer
2013 Ecology

3- Predicting invertebrate herbivory from plant traits: Polycultures show strong nonadditive effects
Loranger, Jessy, Sebastian T. Meyer, Bill Shipley, Jens Kattge, Hannah Loranger, Christiane Roscher, Christian Wirth, Wolfgang W. Weisser
2013 Ecology

4- Interspecific covariation between stomatal density and other functional leaf traits in a local flora
Loranger, Jessy, Bill Shipley
2010 Botany

5- Predicting invertebrate herbivory from plant traits: evidence from 51 grassland species in experimental monocultures
Loranger, Jessy, Sebastian T. Meyer, Bill Shipley, Jens Kattge, Hannah Loranger, Christiane Roscher, Wolfgang W. Weisser
2012 Ecology