Plant
Evolutionary Ecology and Global Change
Prof. Dr. J.F. Niek Scheepens, scheepens@bio.uni-frankfurt.de, telephone 069 798 42132
Together with the staff of the working group Plant Evolutionary Ecology
Module information
Compared to most animals, plants have low mobility and, therefore cannot easily escape adverse environmental conditions. Within the context of global change (climate change, land-use change, etc.), plants need to either adjust their spatial distribution or adapt plastically or evolutionarily to novel environmental conditions. Are they able to do so?
In the lectures, we teach theoretical knowledge from the field of plant evolutionary ecology extended with ecophysiology to understand how plants can adapt evolutionarily to different stress factors. Variation among and within plant species in ecologically relevant traits plays a central role in such adaptations. Furthermore, we focus on methodological approaches in experimental plant ecology, ecophysiology, quantitative genetics, and population genetics in lectures and seminars. In seminar meetings, participants will read and present scientific articles, which will subsequently be critically discussed within the group.
In the practicals, students will design evolutionary ecological experiments (two students per experiment). These experiments will be conducted in the greenhouse or climate chambers, and the results will be presented orally in a symposium. In workshops, students will learn the basics of experimental design, and they will be taught skills to analyze and visualize the acquired data using the statistical software package R.
Time slot of the module: Second half of
the winter semester
Number of participants: 12
Special features: The module is taught in
English.
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