Schütz Martin

Monitoring plant productivity (Swiss National Park)
Monitoring Pflanzenproduktivität (Schweizerischer Nationalpark)

Project Number: CH-3431

Project Type:	Permanent/Monitoring_Project
Project Duration:	04/01/2007 - ?
Funding Source:	WSL ,
Leading Institution:	WSL Birmensdorf
Project Leader:	Dr. Martin Schütz Ökologie der Lebensgemeinschaften WSL Zürcherstrasse 111 8903 Birmensdorf Phone: ; +41 (0) 44 739 25 26 FAX: +41 (0) 44 739 22 15 e-Mail: martin.schuetz(at)wsl.ch http://www.wsl.ch/info/mitarbeitende/schuetz/index_DE
Metadata:	http://www.parcs.ch/snp/mmd_fullentry.php?docu_id=6909

Research Areas:


Monitoring

Disciplines:


botanics
general biology

Abstract:
The Swiss National Park is a unique area to study long-term vegetation processes in the absence of human disturbances. Since its foundation, all human activities, such as fishing, hunting, gathering, or managing are prohibited and visitor access is restricted to walking trails in designated areas. Beside conservation goals, the founders mandated scientists to study the development and recovery of the intensively utilized landscape into a wilderness area. For this purpose, vegetation surveys on permanent plots started as early as 1917 and monitoring was continued consistently until today. Almost 200 permanent plots are currently under study.

The goals of the study are to i) functionally explain long-term vegetation processes (e.g., succession) and ii) link such changes to ecosystem stability (e.g., variability in productivity, species turnover) and ecosystem biodiversity. The project provides baseline data for numerous other research projects dealing with vegetation patterns and processes such as habitat use of ungulates, interactions between herbivores and vegetation, decomposition of organic material, invertebrate diversity, or forest succession.

Leading questions:
The Swiss National Park was founded to allow an intensively utilized landscape to convert to wilderness and to study this process. Monitoring projects were therefore initiated soon after the park foundation in 1914 and consistently continue until today.

Last update: 11/8/21
Source of data: ProClim- Research InfoSystem (1993-2024)
Update the data of project: CH-3431

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