However, it is not clear yet if human impact is the major factor for differences in diversity, it could also be other factors such as water availability, soil properties or as yet unknown factors. This however, we can FAK inhibitor hopefully address after having completed all the data gathering and experimental work. The first results suggest a unique BSC bacterial community at each site and this apparently holds true also for the other organism groups such as lichens and cyanobacteria.
The relationships between the variables; crust coverage, diversity, activity, biomass and the water availability at each site, seem to play a Selleckchem Sotrastaurin major role and needs to be analyzed carefully. Concepts we intend to develop for sustainable management of the two semi-natural and the protection of the two natural sites need to be based on proper knowledge regarding the factors that determine their uniqueness. For example, we cannot begin to guess the recovery
times of heavily or slightly disturbed BSCs before the recovery experiments are completed and the specific carbon gain rates are see more calculated for each site. The initial data and analyses presented here already point out the why importance of BSC protection and that the development of appropriate ways to manage biodiversity of BSCs along the latitudinal and altitudinal gradient are essential. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the ERA-Net BiodivERsA program, with the national funders German Research Foundation (DFG), Austrian Science Fund (FWF), The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS), and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), part of
the 2010–2011 BiodivERsA joint call. We express our sincere thanks to Dr. Johann Peter Gruber, Austria and Tomas Hallingbäck, Sweden for the determination of the mosses of the referring sites. Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. Electronic supplementary material Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Fig. 1 Flow chart of the SCIN-project with single work packages and integration levels Supplementary material 1 (JPEG 2460 kb) Fig. 2 Investigation sites and their equipment.