Announcements

Seminar of Department of Botany and Centre of Excellence EcolChange

Speaker: Dr. Tsipe Aavik is an Associate Professor of Macroecology at the University of Tartu. Her research focuses on habitat fragmentation effects on biodiversity. Dr. Aavik is leading the citizen science project “Looking for Cowslips”.

Title of the talk: Citizen scientists help to reveal the secret sex life of cowslips

Time: Thursday, 11 March 2021 at 14.15

Place: Virtual seminar in Zoom

Summary: “No little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers,” wrote Charles Darwin in his autobiography. Now, nearly 160 years after Darwin’s landmark study on this peculiar reproductive feature of cowslips – heterostyly – a citizen science campaign in Estonia has brought novel insights into the fascinating mating system of cowslips. In the talk, I will give an overview of heterostyly and will introduce the main findings of the citizen science initiative, which expands to Pan-European scale in the forth-coming spring.