GRACE
GRAssland Communities Experiment (GRACE): 300 years of insight from a large-scale natural experiment
A joint project from the Austrian FWF and Czech GACR, with co-PI Petr Keil at CZU, Prague, and cooperation partners Franz Essl at Uni. Vienna and Hana Skokanová at VUKOZ, Brno. Collaborators for the project include Helge Bruelheide and Ute Jandt at Uni Halle, Stefan Dullinger at Uni. Vienna, and Milan Chytrý at Masaryk University, as well as the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) and its ReSurveyEurope initiative.
The research focuses on tracking interactive dynamics of landscapes and grassland plant communities, based on the natural experiment arising from differences in landscape structure along the Austrian-Czech border region.
Selected Project Updates:
14-16 October 2024: This week, we held our project workshop on intersections between landscape and community ecology in Lednice, Czechia. We have also nearly completed the collation of the field data collected over the summer - first analyses of plant community changes over time should be following soon.
26-29 September 2024: This week, A. Clark attended the Treffen Österreichischer Botaniker*innen in Innsbruck to present early results from the GRACE vegetation surveys, with a particular focus on developing new methods for addressing observation error impacts on estimates of diversity and turnover.
3 May 2024: Today, we held our pilot field workshop in Brno, Czechia to test our sampling methods. We also surveyed our first two plots - only 550 to go!
21 February 2024: Applications are now open for a PhD position at Uni VIenna - details here.
10 January 2024: We held our first kick-off meeting in Prague, with our new GRACE postdoc Gabriele Midolo, and collaborators from CZU, VUKOZ, Uni Hall, Uni Vienna, and Masaryk University. Fieldwork will start in May, with first planning stages in February and March. Stay posted for updates!
27 November 2023: Applications are open for the PhD position at Uni Graz - details here. Please feel free to email with questions!
15 November 2023: Pre-announcement for a PhD position at Uni Graz - short post available here. Details to follow in the next few weeks.
6 October 2023: First job announcement: an up to three year postdoc position at CZU Prague, working under Petr Keil. Evaluation begins 31 October. Details here.
22 September 2023: We are delighted to announce that the GRACE project has just been approved for funding. FWF and GACR announcements, along with short press releases on Twitter and Mastodon, have just been released.