Dear colleagues,
Biology Thursday seminar will start the year 2024 with an on-site seminar 25th of January at 2 pm in room IT113 - note unusual time!
Our speaker is Prof. Janne Soininen from the university of Helsinki, on "Diatom island biogeography"
Island biogeography has traditionally been investigated for larger organisms such as plants, birds or insects while biodiversity patterns and drivers for micro-organisms on islands are poorly understood. In this seminar, I will talk about diatom biodiversity on islands globally and how it relates to similar sized continental areas. The results show that island diatoms do not show species-area relationships and biodiversity is lower on islands than continental areas. However, such findings may be explained by island environmental conditions rather than dispersal limitation. The ongoing BIOISLAND project will further reveal various aspects of island biodiversity and how they relate to ecosystem functions.
More on Janne's research at: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/jhsoinin/ and https://scholar.google.fi/citations?user=tXDldfgAAAAJ&hl=fi&oi=ao
Also note that Janne will be the opponent of Jacqueline Malazarte's PhD defence on Fri 26th Jan - more info here: https://www.oulu.fi/en/theses/microbial-metacommunities-subarctic-streams
The seminar program for this semester is still taking shape - the program will be updated here as it develops: https://thursdayseminarbiology.wordpress.com/
Cheers, Heikki