Congratulations, Øystein! Can you tell us a little about your project?
“The project aims to better understand how plants adapt to new pollination environments, such as declining pollinator populations or local changes in the diversity of pollinator species. We know quite a lot about how plants adapt to pollinators, but most of our knowledge comes from specialised systems, where one plant species interacts with one or a few select pollinator species. We are interested in a more general model, so we are focusing our study on one species – Viscaria vulgaris or sticky catchfly – as it has a highly generalised pollination system, i.e. it’s a plant species that interacts with a multitude of functionally diverse pollinator species. Through extensive fieldwork and experiments, we will evaluate how one plant species can adapt to up to 50 different pollinator species simultaneously.”
What do you hope to achieve?
“By studying sticky catchfly, we will be able to collect a dataset that is larger and more complete than any other similar dataset, and I am confident that this will reveal new patterns and relationships that have been difficult to uncover in more typical, less comprehensive datasets. By developing and presenting a new framework for these kinds of studies, I also hope that the project will stand as an important example to inspire other projects with similar themes.”
What does the grant mean for you?
“First of all, this is a welcome confirmation that the work we are doing stands up well in international competition, and that our colleagues agree that our work is both important and well designed. In practical terms, this project will allow us to recruit new staff members and increase the scope of our work, thus enabling us to make the project more comprehensive. We will be able to gather enough data more quickly to address more detailed questions, which are often difficult to approach in the context of more typical projects.”
Text: Johan Joelsson
