Activities for members
A number of activities focussed on biodiversity research is exclusive to GGBC members. This is where our researchers can present their ideas to each other, receive feedback and forge collaborations.
Every Monday at 08:45 we meet up to listen to a GGBC member presenting on a current project. Afterwards we discuss and give feedback, making use of the various expertise within our network. The topics of the presentations range from systematics to ecosystem services in urban environments, from elephants to bromeliads, but all with biodiversity as a common denominator.
Masters and PhD students are encouraged to present in the early stages of each paper/project they are developing. Post-docs and more senior researchers are likewise encouraged to present work that is in early stages, including grant application ideas.
Are you a GGBC member and would you like to present? Let Kate Evans know.
Upcoming talks and available slots:
Date: 29th May
Speaker: Julia Osterman
Title: The effect of pesticides and other stressors on bees
In this talk, I will give an overview of my research studying the effects of pesticides and interactions with other stressors on honey bees and bumble bees and the pollination services they provide. I will discuss future project ideas to disentangle the effects of pesticides on wild bees, specifically oligolectic bees.
17th April: Søren Faurby. "The importance of co-extinction for biodiversity loss"
6th March: NABiS Masters student Melissa Miranda. "Co-extinction of Scavengers and Prey."
27th February: David Ayala. "Including biodiversity in the environmental assessment of bamboo building technologies in the Philippines."
20th February: Stina Weststrand and Åsa Krüger - Botaniska
"Not just a building – new greenhouses in the Gothenburg Botanical Garden"
6th February: Fernando Blanco, Postdoc GD/GGBC. "Network Analysis as useful tool to study ancient ecosystem dynamics".
30th January: Jenny Klingberg, Director GGBC. Introduction from the GGBC's new director. Giving some information about her background and present some of her research focusing on ecosystem services in the urban environment.
16th January: Helene Aronsson, PhD student, GU. "To what extent can we extrapolate knowledge about species richness and abundance from birds to other organismal groups? Introduction of myself and my work."
9th January: Katerina Cerná. Sensing technologies for biodiversities: designing through participatory approaches.
12th December: Jakub Truszkowski, BioEnv, UGOT. 'Seeing the forest through dead trees: towards automated identification of timber origin
21st November. Tobias Rütting, Department of Earth Sciences, UGOT 'Skogaryd Research Catchment – a landscape laboratory'
14th November: Matt Pinder, Department of Marine Science, UGOT. 'Reproducible analysis of eDNA for national biodiversity monitoring programs’
7th November. Franciso Prosdocimi, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 'Environmentalism, genomics and science outreach’
31 October: Rhys Lemoine, Svenning lab at Aarhus University, Determining the ability of certain morphological and behavioural traits to predict the likelihood of extinction in past and present megafauna.
24 oktober: Rebecka Relfson, BioEnv, UGOT, Temporal use of elephant highways among predator and prey species.
October 3rd: Vera Ruijs, BioEnv, UGOT, Reshaping elephant pathways to prevent human-elephant conflict in Botswana.
September 26th: Andrea Belgrano, Swedish Institute for Marine Research, Mapping Ecosystem Services to MPAs: a transdisciplinary perspective
September 5: Søren Faurby, BioEnv, UGOT, Educational materials for learning Western Sweden's 500 common and cool animals.
August 22: Harith Farooq, BioEnv, UGOT, The taxonomical and geographical biases of biological research in Mozambique: The way forward
June 27: Oskar Abrahamsson, Dept. of Economy and Society, UGOT, Walking with non-humans: Exploring meaningful encounters during excursions to recreational landscapes
June 20: Raphaela Infanger, BioEnv, UGOT, Human impact on Fennoscandia’s vegetation throughout the Holocene. - A comparison of the main change points of different vegetation types and modelled human population fluctuations.
June 13: Francine Almeida, BioEnv, UGOT, Linking climate stability with genomic diversity in Euterpe edulis (palm tree)
May 30: Harith Farooq, BioEnv, UGOT, Extinct or Shy: A quest to find two of the least known skinks in East Africa
May 23: Robert Björk, Dept. of Earth Sciences, UGOT, Drivers of Arctic biodiversity and implications for ecosystem processes
May 16: Cinthya Lana, Department of Historical Studies, UGOT, Digital Repatriation in the Global South: a model for open access to museum collections empowering indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon
May 9: Mikael Olsson, BioEnv, UGOT, VIRTUE - Explore aquatic biodiversity through accumulation of organisms on CD-shaped discs using extensive web support. www.virtue.gmbl.se
May 2: Bengt Oxelman, BioEnv, UGOT, Species delimitation: Philosophical and practical considerations
Apr 25: Eskil Mattsson, IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, A conceptual landscape-level approach to assess the impacts of forestry on biodiversity
Apr 11: Allison Perrigo, National vs IUCN Red Lists, similarities, differences and implications for conservation
Mar 28: Simon Schowanek, formerly BioEnv, UGOT, Rewilding: the rocky road from theory to practice
Mar 7: Julia Osterman, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and soon BioEnv, The ecology of crop pollination and its integration into farm management to ensure sustainable and stable crop yield
Feb 28: Tobias Andermann, BioEnv, UGOT, Biodiversity and speciation
Feb 14: William Tejler, BioEnv, Seasonal and decadal changes and fluctuations in the diet of African forest elephants.
Jan 31: Kate Evans, Elephants for Africa: The Push-me Pull- me of Botwana’s elephants; what is driving range expansion.
Jan 24: Geerte Fälthammar de Jong, Monitoring changes in Arctic vegetation phenology using 3 methods
Jan 17: James Hagan, Building a global database of length-mass equations for freshwater macroinvertebrates and zooplankton to make estimating community and species-specific biomass distributions easier and more accessible.
Scope
In this journal club we focus on papers in biodiversity, ecology and systematics that have a broad application. Especially encouraged are methodological and conceptual papers that encourage discussions and allows for participants from different areas within biodiversity research to understand and get value from the journal club. Any organismal group can be covered in the paper but have in mind that the focus of the paper should be relevant for others working outside of that group.
Format
The GGBC journal club meets every other week on Thu at 13:00. The meetings have a hybrid setup and take place in the Botan building, Carl Skottbergs gata 22b, Gothenburg. There will be possibilities to join online for GGBC members not based in Gothenburg. Please refer to the #journal-club channel in the GGBC Slack workspace for Zoom links and information.
For whom?
All levels of researchers and students from MSc-students to professors at the GGBC are welcome. Have you never been to a journal club before? Don't hesitate to reach out and join us to see what it's like!
Presenter and participants roles
Each meeting a member is responsible for presenting a paper of their own choice. Dates for presenting are assigned by the organizer after agreement with the presenter. The presenter is expected to:
- announce their choice of paper at least one week before the meeting.
- present 2-3 slides focusing on: main figures, points or critizism, take home message or questions they have
Participants are expected to:
- have read the paper before the meeting
- bring 1-2 questions or thoughts
Note that it might be possible for PhD-students to receive credits for participation in the Journal Club. The Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at GU awards the students with 0.2 hec for each meeting but please confirm the terms for credits with your examinor.
To sign up or if you have questions, please contact Heléne Aronsson, PhD student at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences who is responsible for arranging the journal club.
helene.aronsson@bioenv.gu.se
The GGBC Taxonomy Club at the University of Gothenburg was founded in 2019 by a group of enthusiastic young botanists from across the globe. Their motivation was to share and learn from one another’s skills in plant identification, using the collections at HerbariumGB. Today, Taxonomy Club has grown beyond its plant focus, and explores fungal and animal taxonomy as well.
Beyond their work with morphological identification, Taxonomy Club members often discuss relevant topics in their monthly meetings, for example species delimitation in light of morphological and molecular data. This is especially relevant as many members are working with collections directly, as well as with “big data” and next-generation sequencing (NGS) data from the collections.
Taxonomy Club has also been working alongside Universeum to put their identification skills to the test, putting names on the plant collections in Universeum’s Rainforest. You can watch a short film, produced with the support of BECC, about this member-driven initiative.
Are you a GGBC member working with taxonomy and interested in joining the club? You can contact Anne-Sophie Quatela for more information.
Every year in December the members of the GGBC get together to network, establish new collaborations and present on the past year's achievements and findings. The meetings started in 2017 and on December 5-6 we hold our annual meeting for 2022. Read the programme.
The meetings take place at Bioteket and in venues at our partner organisations.