Joint Seminar of Department of Botany, Doctoral School of Earth Sciences and Ecology Centre of Excellence EcolChange
Andy Taylor is fungal ecologist at the James Hutton Institute, Scotland. He visits Department of Botany as an opponent at PhD defence of Sten Anslan on November 24th, at 10.15 in auditorium 1019 in Chemicum, Ravila 14a, Tartu.
Title of the talk: Scotland’s forgotten Kingdom
Time: Thursday, 23. November 2017 at 15.15
Place: Tartu, Lai 40-218 (Vaga auditorium)
If there is a kindom, there is a king (screenshot from The Last King of Scotland, 2006)
Abstract
The surface of Scotland like much of northern Europe was wiped clean by the last glaciation. This should mean that all the biodiversity present today should have appeared in the last 10,000 years. We have been investigating the symbiotic fungi associated with many of our native plant species in relation to past history and climate and have found strong climatic structuring of communities and remarkably species rich communities associated with rapidly declining arctic alpine vegetation in Scottish mountains. The appearance of endemic fungal species suggests that there may have been vegetated, ice free Nunataks from which at least part of the Scottish flora and mycota may be derived. I will give an overview of these investigations.
