Welcome to 'Life as a Postdoc!'
How everything started and what I do
I applied for a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) Independent Fellowship about 1.5 years ago. On September 9th, 2020, I submitted my application after months of writing, reading, rewriting, and fearing that my ideas will be not good enough. After months of waiting and nearly giving up hope, I was informed in Spring 2021 that I had been selected for the MSCA action call’s Widening Fellowship. It is not as prestigious as the original Indenpendent Fellowship, but almost as good! It is intended for researchers in ‘academically developing’ European countries, and I will be performing my research at the Botany Department of Charles University. I will be able to do my first entirely autonomous research on tropical alpine radiations in the Andes of South America and the highlands of East Africa. Roswitha Schmickl and Filip Kolar will be my supervisors throughout this period. As part of the Widening Fellowship, I committed to explain how my work looks, and my intention is to post about it on a regular basis here.
I am interested in tropical alpine ecosystems that are found around the tropics in high altitudes, usually above 3500 m. The climate conditions are fairly harsh here, with high temperatures during the day and frost at night. Compared to alpine regions in more temperate areas, such as Europe and North America, plants here cannot go dormant during the winter, but must be able to withstand cold temperatures while growing and flowering. These plants have developed several techniques to do so: they are trying to build a warmer microclimate around them, by growing in the form of cushions, keeping dead leaves, or being excessively hairy.
As part of the tropical alpine radiations working group at Charles University, colleagues and I are attempting to understand why biodiversity patterns differ in the Paramo, the South American high altitude areas, and the Afroalpine. In the Paramo, we discover several huge radiations (species that descended from a common recent ancestor), but in East Africa, the radiations are much smaller. Can this be explained solely by the different area sizes and degrees of isolation, or do Pleistocene oscillations have a greater impact on speciation? A question that we hope to answer in the next years. We are fortunate to be able to draw on years of collections by Petr Sklenar at Charles University for Paramo genera and the working group of Christian Brochman at the National History Museum of Oslo for the Afroalpine (the East African alpine areas). Without their offer for collaborations to use their material such research would not be possible.