March WEES seminar: Prof. Tomas Roslin
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Wageningen Evolution & Ecology Seminars (WEES)
Dear All,
We are pleased to invite you to attend March’s Wageningen Evolution & Ecology Seminars (WEES) in-person! The seminar will take place on Thursday, March 30th, 16:00-17:00 in Orion C1040. This will be followed by drinks at The Spot!
The associated workshop will be from 14.00-15.00 in Orion B3042. The workshop gives attendees the opportunity to meet the seminar’s speaker and have a discussion based on a topic of their expertise. Furthermore, BSc and MSc students can get 1 ECTS for attending 2 workshops.
Registration is required for this workshop, and you can sign up by emailing Lydia Cornu (lydia.cornu@wur.nl)
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Seminar: Making sense of global biodiversity – exploring new frontiers and collaborations (16:00 in Orion C1040)
Prof. Tomas Roslin
Professor in Insect Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Sweden
Principal Investigator for the LifePlan Project: A planetary inventory of life.
We all know that biodiversity is dwindling. Yet, for much of this diversity, we do not know what it is, where it is and what drivers it responds to. Joint data repositories are flooded by data on the least diverse organism groups, whereas data on the most diverse groups are in short supply. Given this state of affairs, we need to aim faster, higher and stronger in biodiversity science.
Prof. Roslin will talk about our attempts to do so, and to generate commensurate biodiversity data across organism groups. More specifically, he will talk about the LIFEPLAN project, which aims to characterize biological diversity through a worldwide sampling program, and develop the bioinformatic and statistical approaches needed to make the most out of these data. This is one of the most ambitious, globally distributed and systematically collected datasets to date on a broad range of taxonomical groups. Assessing global biodiversity calls not only for new methods and tools, but for new ways of working together as a global scientific community. Each of those elements are now coming together, and Prof. Roslin will argue that we are currently seeing the most exciting times ever in the discovery of nature!
Workshop: Distributed Science – The benefits and challenges of crowdsourcing in research (14:00 in Orion B3042)
Crowdsourcing, crowd science, distributed experiments, global sampling designs — call it what you will. By teaming up in new ways, we scientists can achieve so much more than ever before. In this workshop, we will discuss the new vistas opened up by collaborating in constellations of tens to thousands of people, as well as some of the challenges involved.
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About WEES:
WEES is an initiative of PhD students and postdocs at Wageningen University to organize a continuing series of stimulating seminars on contemporary topics in evolution and ecology. For this series we invite researchers from all over the world who have leading roles in their field. We aim to bring together different groups at Wageningen University using a variety of systems, but with a common interest in evolutionary and ecological questions. WEES is funded by graduate schools PE&RC, WIMEK, EPS, VLAG, and WIAS.
Want to organize seminars yourself? Join WEES!
WEES is looking for new members! We aim for a broad and diverse range in topics and would like to welcome new members to help and include topics not represented yet. If you are curious, send an email to weeswageningen@gmail.com and join one of our meetings.
For more information, please visit our website weeswageningen.nl.