Silke Langenheder

I am a professor in Limnology at Uppsala University and work on a range of projects in the field of community and ecosystem ecology. I am the Director of the Erken Laboratory, Uppsala University’s limnological field station and the Coordinator of the SITES AquaNet mesoocosm infrastructure.

The overall aim with my research is to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms that regulate diversity and functioning of microbial communities in freshwater systems, in particular in response to environmental change and disturbances.

My group 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?

To address the above questions we use primarily experimental studies using both lab-scale microcosms as well as field-based mesocosms.

Current projects focus on how the relative importance of different assembly mechanisms that structure bacterial metacommunities (selection, drift, and dispersal) is influenced by different global environmental change drivers.

I also work with coordinated mesocosm experiments using the SITES AquaNet infrastructure. Current experiments focus on effects of different run-off and salinity disturbance regimes on the functioning and composition of plankton communities. These are large, collaborative team-science projects which are open to transnational access through the EU project AQUACOSM-plus.