Postdoc (f/m/x) - Spatio-temporal patterns of soil fungal communities along land-use gradients

The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) with its 1,100 employees has gained an excellent reputation as an international competence centre for environmental sciences. We are part of the largest scientific organisation in Germany, the Helmholtz association. Our mission: Our research seeks to find a balance between social development and the long-term protection of our natural resources.

In terms of biomass and diversity, fungi represent a dominant organism group in soils. They provide important ecosystem services, such as soil formation, element cycling, plant nutrition, detoxification, as well as the exchange of gas and matter with atmosphere and ground water. Accordingly, they cover a broad sprectrum of lifestyles. Thanks to the development of high throughput sequencing and powerful bioinformatics methods, it has become possible to analyse the fungal biodiversity at large scales and over a long time. Within the DFG priority program Biodiversity Exploratories (https: // www. biodiversity- exploratories.de), Core project 8 monitors the general and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi since 2011 in the soils of the 300 forest and grassland experimental plots across Germany. These plots are characterized by different land-use and management regimes, which shape the fungal communties over space and time.