This year’s last lecture in the “Science in the Centre” series will be delivered by the forest ecologist Michał Bogdziewicz.
Bogdziewicz is a professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Last autumn, he won the NCN Award 2022 for top young scientists working in Poland. Last spring, he was also the first Polish researcher to win the Tansley Medal, one of the world’s most important distinctions given to young biologists who research plants.
He is carrying out an NCN grant, as well as ERC’s Starting Grant.
At 6 pm on 21 December, Bogdziewicz will give a talk entitled: “Hunger and Abundance: Tree Reproduction as an Unstable Foundation of Food Webs”. The session will be held within the framework of “Science in the Centre”, a series of talks organised by the NCN and the Nicolaus Copernicus Foundation, and will be livestreamed on the Foundation’s YouTube channel.
“There are years in which hundreds of thousands of trees all over a given region together produce tons of seeds and years in which no tree of a given species does that. For animals, that means alternating periods of abundance, which allows them to reproduce on a great scale, and hunger, which decimates their populations. This leads to cascading perturbations in forest ecosystems: abundant seeds invite large numbers of rodents and numerous rodents mean more birds of prey. A year later, the rodents are gone, while the birds of prey stay on, looking for other prey”, says Michał Bogdziewicz. In his talk, he will discuss these interrelationships in forest ecosystems and explain how they are affected by climate change.
During the session, you will also be able to ask him questions via chat.
You can rewatch previous lectures online.