Dear Flatmate. Can you pass up the calcium please? New biodiversity research.

In Germany, as in other cultures, living in a WG (Wohngemeinschaft, or flatshare) is common for students. The arrangement is primarily to take advantage of communal living space with lesser cost.

This concept of humans sharing living space is being extrapolated by Nadine Prill into the underground depths of grassland root systems in Europe.

The 24-year-old German student is in the early stages of a piece of Master’s research at the University of Freiburg that, she hopes, will impact the future of crop farming, advances in biofuel research and at the very least the sustainability of Europe’s grasslands.

Her work is investigating the mechanisms driving the relationship between positive biodiversity and higher productivity.

What’s specifically new in Nadine’s work is the methodology she is deploying.

Meet Nadine

On first meeting Nadine, any assumptions on her area of study might include medicine, politics or even education. A little down the list might come molecular biology and ecology. But to say Nadine is passionate about her new Masters Research into plant ecology is actually being modest. As an extension of her undergraduate studies into environmental economics, developmental biology and ecology at the University of Göttingen, Germany, she spent six months at the University of Sussex in England and a further three months at the Centre for Population Biology at the Imperial College London. She will be doing her PhD in Plant Science at the University of Oxford.

Over the next two weeks Nadine will be harvesting the first part of her research into the quantification of root activity in mixed cultures.

The research, which is the major work for her Master’s degree, involves analyzing the different levels of nutrient uptake by the roots of different grasses and forbes (wild flowers) from the central belt of Europe (UK, France, up to Sweden, across Germany to Eastern Europe and down to northern parts of Italy and Spain).

Meet the methodology – flat sharing

Nadine has planted 60 pots in a greenhouse with various combinations of grass and forb cultures. It is important to mention that these pots are not your standard everyday garden pot. For the study, Nadine has used polyvinyl chloride pots –12cm in diameter and 60cm in height, allowing a rather natural development of the root system.

After the root system is established, these tubes are then injected at different depths (5cm, 15cm and 30cm) with what are commonly called tracers. A tracer is a substance introduced into an organism or system so that its distribution through the organism can be followed, or traced.

Nadine will be using the tracers Strontium, which is equivalent in its uptake behaviour to Calcium, and Lithium and Rubidium which are equivalent to Potassium – two important nutrients for plant growth. The Lithium will be injected at 5cm, the Strontium at 15cm and the Rubidium at 30cm.

Within the 60 tubes, Nadine has planted varying combinations of monocultures (a single plant species), two-species mixtures and four-species mixtures.

After harvest and then upon dissecting the plants, Nadine will then observe the amount of tracers incorporated into the plants, which will enable her to infer on the root activity in the different soil layers.

From this she will have direct data on ‘niche partitioning’ as a mechanism for coexistence of species and for ‘resource complementarity’, or a more efficient uptake of nutrients in mixtures. The idea being that the plants can coexist because they are ‘sharing a flat’ because some species are rooting in the upper soil layers and some in the lower soil layers – finding their own niche, consuming varying amounts of calcium and potassium and avoiding competition.

Meet Nadine’s supervisor

Nadine’s supervisor, Prof. Dr. Michael Scherer-Lorenzen is particularly excited about the methodology of Nadine’s work and how it may help facilitate more sustainable future bioenergy projects.

Dr Scherer-Lorenzen said: “Some similar experiments had been done in this direction but not using the number of chemical tracer resources and the number of depth recordings”.

“It will hopefully help elucidate the mechanisms of how species ‘share their flat’ – how the underground niches are partitioned below the ground and whether this niche partitioning could be a mechanism to explain why under certain circumstances more species are more efficient in their resource use”.