dr. ALD (Fons) van der Plas

My research focuses primarily on the causes and consequences of biodiversity change, and on land management practices promoting biodiversity. Specifically, I am interested into how various global change drivers, including climate and land use change, cause changes in both the richness and composition of plant and animal communities. Furthermore, I am also interested in what the consequences of global change drivers are for the ability of ecosystems to provide multiple ecosystem functions (‘ecosystem multifunctionality’), how relationships between global change drivers and ecosystem functioning are driven by biodiversity across spatial scales, and how insights on this can be used for conservation management and policy. To do this, I also work with plant traits, and how these can be used to explain differences among species in their effects on ecosystem functioning. My research involves a range approaches, including experiments, comparative field studies and simulation studies.