Upcoming events

During this meeting, three PhD candidates will give a talk: Juan Pablo Mora, Justine Toulotte and Marciel Mendez.

Life on earth depends on photosynthesis. Crop yields are a function of the dynamics of photosynthesis during the day and during the growing season. Increasing yields to produce more food, fodder, and the biomass for a non-fossil carbon economy therefore requires enhanced photosynthesis. Significant progress has recently been made in designing plants with improved photosynthesis; field trials have proven that this will work, even or especially under fluctuating light. However, scaling effects from the molecular level to crop yield makes it difficult to predict the result of bioengineering plants and crops. Developing models that can quantify such effects are crucial to support the application of improved photosynthesis as a route to produce better crop yields.

In this course, a brief overview of molecular biology, the advent of high-throughput measurement techniques and large databases containing biological knowledge, and the importance of networks to model all this will be given. A number of peculiar features of biological networks will be highlighted.

This course will teach how to get the most out of new types of phenotypic data and integrate these data into genetic analyses. The course will deal with pre-processing of new phenotypic data (image pre-processing, spatial and longitudinal modelling) and show the integration of new phenotypic traits into QTL and genomic prediction models.

In this month’s WEES (Wageningen Evolution & Ecology Seminar) Dr. Chris Templeton (Department of Biology, Pacific University (USA)) will give a lecture, called 'Sound the Alarm! Anti-predator communication in social flocks of chickadees and tits'. The workshop is scheduled for Thursday 28 June 2018 (13:30 - 16:00h) in Orion (room C4016) at 13:30h.

The Summer School is connected to an event that turns around the concept of traditional academic conferences, in the sense that participants will spend most of their time doing fieldwork and generating new insights, rather than solely reporting on their ongoing research.

The CWE symposium brings together research on both the opportunities and consequences of the current energy transition for freshwater and marine ecosystems.

The Summer School Agroecology and animal production is especially designed for PhD students in the field of agriculture, and professionals in agriculture and the feed and food industry, such as consultants, technical advisors, policy makers and researchers.

The course will provide an overview about the application of metabolomics in ecological and biodiversity research. We will explore the tools and approaches that are used to obtain, process and analyse metabolomics data.

The health of people, animals, plants and their environments are closely connected. This short course on Global One Health (GOH) aims to foster interdisciplinary thinking on the cutting edge of agricultural production, the food supply chain and nutritional and public health outcomes (human, plant and animal) in the framework of a food systems approach. Using an academically rooted food systems approach, synergies and trade-offs between scientific disciplines, such as social, environmental, microbiological, animal, plant, epidemiological disciplines, will be explored. Also the role of public and private stakeholders in the food system (farm to fork) will be discussed.

Tropentag is an annual, international conference on food security, natural resource management and rural development in the tropics (sensu lato). It is a development-oriented and interdisciplinary conference. It addresses issues of resource management, environment, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food, nutrition and related sciences in the context of rural development, sustainable resource use and poverty alleviation worldwide.

Sfécologie (the French Ecological Society's International Conference) will take place from 22 - 25 October 2018 at the historic Couvent des Jacobins in the old part of the city of Rennes.

In this course, matrix methods will be used to analyze models based on prevalence and incidence data. The methods will go beyond the fixation on mean results and will incorporate variance and stochasticity. The class will introduce methods based on Markov chains, Markov chains with rewards, multistate matrix models, and matrix calculus. The new analyses will be compared, where possible, to traditional approaches.

Seven sessions highlight the advances in soil modeling during the ISMC Conference 2018.

Human social networks are currently more visible than ever due to the existence of social media. Yet social networks are not a human invention; they exist all around us in nature. From plants that use a thread-like fungus to warn each other about predators, to coral reefs that form sustainable recycling systems; in all natural systems organisms share information and resources to their own benefit and that of the network. On the PE&RC day 2018 we would like you to meet the scientists who discover and unravel the connections in nature’s social networks. We will take a look into the amazing functionality and connectivity of these natural networks and how we can learn from them to optimise our own man-made networks.