Hey there, I’m Sophie. I have just joined the Speciation, Adaptation, and Coevolution research group as a PhD student supervised by Øystein Opedal, Magne Friberg and Ola Olsson. My project focuses on floral trait evolution, and I am going to investigate how human land use affects floral trait evolution of a wild plant by changing pollinator communities in the landscape. I’m trying to predict how changes in land-use shift the optimal state of a floral trait, and how many generations it would take a population of wild plants to adapt and reach that new optimum.
I split both my bachelor’s and my master’s degree in biology between LMU Munich and Lund University. For my bachelor thesis, I investigated the effect of human disturbance on young Eurasian Curlews, but since the start of my master’s degree, I have been fascinated with plant-pollinator interactions.
Throughout my master’s, I have been working with pollen identification, and for my thesis I investigated the effect of the population size of a rare plant on its reproductive success through varying pollinator communities and pollinator behavior at sites with different plant population sizes. Now I am very excited to start working at the interface of floral evolution, pollination ecology, and human impacts.
In my free time I enjoy exploring the outdoors on foot (preferably in the company of my dog) or on horseback, trying to travel to remote places by train, playing board games, and reading. I’m looking forward to meeting many of you over the next few years!
