Successful applications

Travel to the herbaria in Paris and Brussels (2008: Norbert Holstein)

Norbert writes: "The EES travel fund enabled me to finance the extension of my already funded travel to London, where large collections are situated. So, I could also visit the herbaria in Paris (Musée naturelle d’histoire naturelle) and Brussels (Herbarium of the National Botanic Garden of Belgium), which were of special interest. I worked in the herbaria each for three days. I corrected misidentified specimens, labeled type specimens as such or corrected incorrectly labeled specimens. Collections that offered new data about distribution or ecology as well as interesting morphological details were documented by photograph. This resulted in almost 900 pictures of 305 specimens. Paris was an early center of botanical research and several important collections e.g. that of Wilhelm Schimper are accumulated there. Also Charles Victor Naudin, who worked on Cucurbitaceae and described several new species, operated here. This and the colonial history of France, which eased French botanists to collect in the French territories, made the growth of the Coccinia collection possible. Paris herbarium offered more than 300 specimens, of which about 120 revealed new insights into distribution, ecology and morphology of Coccinia species. Paris herbarium also features 32 type specimens, whose morphological studies are crucial for the taxonomical work. Some types were not labeled as such for more than 130 years. Although Paris herbarium offers digital scans of their type specimens, some characters like the hair type, which is important in Coccinia, cannot be surveyed with these scans and must be seen live. What holds for Paris, also holds for Brussels, where Cucurbitaceae researcher Alfred Cogniaux worked and described many new species. Also the large collections from the former Belgian colonies could extend my knowledge about several species. 186 from more than 500 specimens offered new data for my monograph of Coccinia. Brussels National Garden herbarium features 35 type specimens. Although a loan of the Coccinia collection from Brussels was requested before, only 27 specimens were sent, so visiting the herbarium was the only possibility to see the complete collection. I’d like to thank the EES for funding the travel, which provided data whose processing took weeks and raised the value of my work strongly".

Sebastian writes: "I visited some of the northernmost beech forests in Europe e.g. the Söderåsen national park in southern Sweden. With its 1625 ha it is the biggest protected deciduous forest in northern Europe situated in a great landscape with steep hills and narrow river valleys where you can find Sweden’s tallest beech and oak. The material I obtained during my field trip will add to the samples already collected in Germany to clarify the internal relationship of this common minute mushroom."

Matthias writes: "It was really fascinating to see the ants in their natural habitat, especially when I discovered large colonies of about eighty ore more individuals all living in one small acorn. In addition to my time in New York I spent two days in Boston, Massachusetts, where I collected ants, too. This will give me the opportunity to do further genetically analyses and to compare different populations."

Angelika writes: "When Prof. Dr. Susanne Foitzik suggested me to apply for the EES grant for making a trip to a scientist congress I was really enthusiastic. As I didn't know anything about such meetings I looked for some „graduate-level“ meetings that sounded interesting. So I decided to visit the 13th Graduate Meeting of Evolutionary Biology of the Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft(DZG)in Hamburg in February 2008 to present the results of my diploma thesis."

Iris writes: "The meeting was very informal. Since all scientist spent breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee breaks together, it was possible to meet many interesting people. The most positive thing about the conference was the very nice and almost familial atmosphere."

Sonja writes: "As the meeting is organized mainly by and for PhD students the atmosphere was very informal. Nevertheless, the talks and posters had a very good quality and everybody was very well prepared. During the breaks and poster sessions it was easy to get into nice conversations. I really liked the meeting and thank the EES committee for funding me to go there."

Rebecca writes: "I got a lot of feedback and helpful suggestions. Between the talks I could make new contacts and join a lot of fruitful discussions. For me as a new member it was a very good chance to get to know other members of the Society and to discuss my work with experienced researchers from several fields of behavioural biology as well as topic related ones."

Natalie writes: "I got a good overview of the research focuses and currently applied and new methods in systematics that could be also interesting for my own work. Of course the conference was a great possibility to meet old colleagues and new people to talk about their and my research and get new ideas and insides. I presented a summary of the data of my recently published paper in a talk “Reevaluation of the cox1 intron in Araceae and angiosperms indicates a history dominated by loss rather than horizontal gene transfer”.

Sebastian writes: "During lunch break, I met the organisation team to get useful tips, as I plan to take part in next year’s organisation team when the graduate meeting will take place in Munich. Then it was my turn to give a talk which was about behavioural and chemical changes in orphaned Temnothorax ant workers. It was my first talk at a conference, so it was nice to stand in front of such a friendly audience."

Sarah writes: "I visited the “Petit Pois Déridé” conference which is organized every year in a different town of France by Population Genetics research groups. It is an opportunity for the students (both PhD and Master) but also for Post-docs and professors not only to know more about what is going on in French population genetics research but also to give a chance for people to get to know each other. This year we were 200 people in the University of Poitier. I gave a talk and I got good comments about my work. During the conference, we were all roomed at the same place in the campus and I could discuss about my research and exchange ideas with the others. There was no boundary between the students and the professors. It was an atmosphere really friendly and I got to know many people."

Florian writes: "On Wednesday I took part in the “mid-congress excursion”, which was in my case a rafting tour on the Rouge River. It was a lot of big and wet fun, perfect for a limnologist. Besides the rafting, I had the possibility to talk with lots of people from the congress in an easy atmosphere."

Natalie writes: "It was an interesting conference as it was held under a concrete main theme, the high biodiversity in Mediterranean regions, investigated and discussed under different points of view. It gave a nice overview on the field of work of established work groups as well as insides in analyzes and interpretation of data on different backgrounds. As the chromosome study is a new part of my work, I got much input and information about approaching my hypotheses and about interpretation of the data, by talks as well as by posters."

Andrea writes: "The conference “Statistics under one umbrella” in Bielefeld was organized by the “Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Statistik (DAGStat)” and tried to bring many different areas of statistics together at one meeting. The visitor had the possibility to choose between a wide variety of sessions and to inform about subjects in which he normally not works. There were sessions about biostatistics, statistics in agriculture, economics, statistical software, classification or time and space theory."