Silke Langenheder

• Medarbetarportalen vid Uppsala universitet (kräver inloggning)

I am a microbial community ecologist and the overall aim with my research is to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms that regulate diversity and ecosystem functioning, in particular in response to environmental change and disturbances. Such knowledge is essential, but still sparse, for bacteria despite their major role as biological drivers in biogeochemical cycles, and hence investigating this has been in the focus of my past and present research activities.

My research addresses the following fundamental ecological questions:

(1) What determines the relationship between diversity and ecosystem functioning?

(2) What are the mechanisms regulating diversity across space and time?

(3) How do environmental change and disturbances influence biodiversity and ecosystem functioning?

My work focuses on bacterial communities in freshwater systems but I have also experience working with estuarine systems and soils. To address these questions I primarily use hypothesis-driven experimental studies and comparative field studies (mostly using rock-pools as natural model systems) in combination with molecular and multivariate statistical methods. At the moment the focus of our work is to understand more about the relative importance of different assembly mechanisms that structure bacterial metacommunities (i.e. sets of local communities that are connected via dispersal) and how metacommunities are affected by disturbances.