Herb biomass estimation at Mt. Kilimanjaro

Herb biomass 1m^2 measured in 4 subsamples in KiLi project.

For the herbaceous biomass, four 0.25-m2 samples per plot were taken non-randomly from areas were the herbaceous layer was considered as being representative of the whole plot. The biomass of the herbaceous layer (hereafter herbaceous biomass) included forbs with a woody stem, mosses and lichens, which were collected from ground level using a wooden frame of 50 × 50 cm and scissors. Samples were dried in a drying oven at 72°C for 72 hours and then weighed. In habitat types with pronounced rainfall seasons (savanna, maize fields, grasslands, coffee plantations, home gardens), biomass was collected after the wet season maximum, in December and January 2010–2011, while in the maize plots, it was collected in June and July 2012, shortly before the harvest. The other samples were collected between December 2010 and October 2012. This allowed us to estimate the maximum standing biomass of the herbaceous layer on each plot.

The KiLi project (2010-2018) is a German Science Foundation (DFG) funded research unit (DFG research unit FOR1246) that focuses on biodiversity and ecosystem processes along altitudinal and disturbance gradients on Mt. Kilimanjaro (Tanzania, Africa), capitalizing on its world-wide unique range of climatic and vegetation zones. The research unit comprises 2 central projects and 7 subprojects from various disciplines. On a total of 60 study sites in both natural and human-disturbed ecosystems biodiversity (e.g. plants, soil arthropods, ants, bees, frogs, lizards, bats, birds), related ecosystem processes (decomposition, seed dispersal, pollination, herbivory, predation), and biogeochemical processes and properties of ecosystems (climate, soil properties and nutrient status, regulation of water and carbon fluxes, trace gas emissions, primary productivity, functional diversity) are analyzed.