Seminar: Phytochemical Diversity Across Space and Time

This a joint seminar co-organized by SwissForestLab and the WSL-Eawag Biodiversity Center.

The ongoing global decline in biodiversity calls for improved frameworks to quantify and understand ecosystem functioning. Traditional approaches based on plant functional traits (e.g., specific leaf area, height, stem density) provide useful but often coarse proxies for ecological processes, as they fail to capture the underlying biochemical mechanisms driving plant–environment interactions. Here, we propose that integrating plant metabolomics into functional ecology offers a more mechanistic and predictive understanding of biodiversity patterns. Using elevational gradients in the Swiss Alps as natural laboratories, we examine how plant metabolomes vary across environmental conditions and how these variations relate to plant life-history strategies. Focusing on multiple taxa, including Cardamine species, we show that phytochemical diversity is not strictly phylogenetically conserved but instead clusters along environmental gradients. Plants at higher elevations converge toward similar chemo-phenotypes, reflecting a growth–defense trade-off strategy. At broader scales, alpine plants exhibit reduced resistance to herbivores compared to lowland species, linked to variation in both direct chemical defenses and indirect defenses such as volatile organic compound emission. At the community level, large-scale sampling across elevation transects reveals strong phylogenetic signals in phytochemical diversity, alongside distinct spatial patterns: low to mid elevations harbor higher chemical diversity, whereas alpine systems exhibit greater chemical endemism. Extending beyond elevation, similar patterns emerge along other gradients, such as aridity in sub-Saharan ecosystems. Overall, our findings demonstrate that plant metabolomes shift rapidly across ecological gradients and play a central role in mediating species interactions and ecosystem processes. We argue that incorporating phytochemical diversity into biodiversity assessments provides a powerful avenue for advancing ecological theory and addressing environmental challenges in a changing world.

Our public seminars are hybrid, with the option to attend in person or online.

The Teams link will be published closer to the date.

The WSL Biodiversity Seminar Series are organized by the WSL-Eawag Biodiversity Center. Every two weeks, we aim to host a seminar speaker who presents research or outreach on topics relevant to the biodiversity community at WSL. The seminars are public and are usually broadcast online.

To find out more about the WSL-Eawag Biodiversity Center and a complete list of events, please visit our website. 

Please send an email to events-biodiversity(at)wsl.ch if you would like to be updated on the activities of the WSL-Eawag Biodiversity Center.