More about our research subjects
Research at the department includes several broad subjects in biological and environmental sciences, but to solve complex questions requires collaborations.
Research at BioEnv covers terrestrial, limnic and marine environments, and the projects include many different organisms from both the plant- and animal kingdom. It has its base in classical research subjects like ecology & evolutionary biology, conservation biology, physiology & cell biology, systematics as well as environmental sciences. But there are no sharp boundaries between the subjects, and to answer complex questions within both fundamental and applied research we collaborate.
Research areas
We have identified five main research areas, that covers most of the research done at the department. These spans in many case of several of the classic subject, but van also be specializations within a single subject.
Most researchers are engaged in several projects, that may cover more than one main research area.
Biology consist of many disciplines, and how you divide it depends on the starting point. If you start with organism, you can differentiate between microbiology (study of bacteria and other microorganisms), botany (study of plants) and zoology (study of animals). There are also subcategories like ornithology (birds), entomology (insects) or phycology (algae).
If you instead start with their natural habitats, you may talk about marine biology (everything that lives in the sea) or limnology (fresh water).
You may also use different scientific questions and methodologies as the starting point, like physiology & cell biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, systematics and conservation biology.
Within the subject environmental science, one study the relations between humans and the surrounding environment. Environmental science is close to biology but has also tight links to both other natural sciences like chemistry and earth sciences, and to social sciences and technology.
