Embedded Files
05.2025
There is still time to register for the Forester-Researcher Workshop on Oriental beech, which we organize with the University of Freiburg and the INRAe.
05.2025
Dr Alberto Garcia joined the group for a six-month "postdoc" financed by the BNF program. He will work on exploring the use of genetic diversity indices from GenDivRange to test evolutionary theory predictions and for conservation. Welcome Alberto!
At the same time, Dr Daniella Schweizer will leave and join the Social Science group, where she will have more adequate support for her Spark project.
21.10.2024
🎉 Dr Daniella Schweizer received an SNF Spark project grant: "Bottom-up versus top-down readiness for implementing assisted population migration in Europe". Congratulations to Daniella!
01.09.2024
New postdoc, Justine Charlet de Sauvage joined the group! Justine did her PhD in forest ecology at the ETH Zurich. She will work on the analysis of the MyGardenOfTrees pilot 2021-2023 trials and try to understand if there is evidence for provenance environment interactions.
25.04.2024
🎉 New project got funded by the Velux Stiftung: “Attitudes towards assisted migration across Europe: an experimental approach (TAMERS)”
TAMERS will run for the next 3 years and study attitudes towards assisted migration across Europe. The aims of this project are (1) to clarify the definition of assisted migration using an interdisciplinary approach involving principles from forestry, ecology, evolution and social science, (2) to identify country-specific resistance and gaps in knowledge transfer by assessing the role of information flow and trust between scientists and practitioners, and (3) to develop recommendations for communicating assisted migration actions at the European scale.
Our current group member, Dr Daniella Schweizer will be hired to kick-start this project!
15.12.2023
Dr Daniella Schweitzer joined the team and will be responsible for organizing the macro-garden experiments of MyGardenOfTrees. Welcome Daniella!
05.12.2023
MyGardenOfTrees workshop in Slovenia. Big thank you to Boris Rantasa from the Slovenian Forest Institute and to the Kocevje forest district for their commitment to the project!
12.2023
A crazy month... Getting ready with 300 seed parcels to be distributed to voluntary foresters across Europe!
01.12.2023
Fabian Suter joins the MyGardenOfTrees team as local coordinator in Switzerland! Welcome Fabian!
01.11.2023
Fodor Bernadett, local coordinator for Hungary and neighboring countries, joins the WSL for 1.5 months to help with the preparation of parcels and the supervision of student helpers!
Several student helpers join the team to help with the preparation of the seed parcels. Welcome Julia, Julie, Marie, Lorena, Theresa, Kai!
An unexpected meeting with a participant!
13.07.2023
The second cycle of the germination trials are established with Fagus and Abies seeds! Thank you everybody for the committed work!
Thank you to Davide, Nadiia, Ariane, Camilla, Marharyta, Mattia, Oliver!
Re-plating the surviving seedlings of cycle 1
Nadiia and Oliver sowing seeds
Ariane and Marharyta in action
01.05.2023
Ariane Mora and Gordana Kaplan are joining the group for post-docs: they will put together their expertise in computational biology & remote sensing to develop a machine learning algorithm to follow hybridization between introduced Oriental and native European beech. Their work is co-supervised by Prof Merry Schuman, co-PI of RemHybridMon.
15.04.2023
The first cycle of the germination trials are finally established! Thank you everybody for the committed work!
Thank you to Davide, Nadiia, Mirjam, Azzurra, Ariane and also Maude & Felix who exceptionally stepped in to help!
03.04.2023
Davide Bernasconi joined the group for a 6 months internship!
29.11.2022
Group dinner in Zurich to celebrate the end of the seed collection campaign!
From left to right: Camilla, Nicole, Nadiia, Mirjam, Azzurra, Yohann, Jani and Kati
25.11.2022
Camilla's paper entitled a "A novel synthesis of two decades of microsatellite studies on European beech reveals decreasing genetic diversity from glacial refugia" has been accepted in Tree Genetics & Genomes! Congratulations!
20.11.2022
Our teams are back from the 2022 seed collection campaign of MyGardenOfTrees! We collected over 1600 kg of fir cones and 800 kg of beechnuts across Europe - amazing effort from all teams!
collecting fir seeds
and the resulting bag of fir cones
collecting beech seeds
and the resulting bag of beech nuts
01.11.2022
Azzurra Pistone (MSc, University of Bern) joined the group for a 6 months internship. Azzurra will combine pollen records and coalescent simulations to predict the spatial distribution of genetic diversity in silver fir. Welcome Azzurra!
10.10.2022
Our review paper entitled "Risks, benefits, and knowledge gaps of non-native tree species in Europe" has been accepted in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, section Conservation and Restoration Ecology! Congratulations to Anastazija and thank you for all her hard and committed work!
01.07.2022
Check out our new publication in Molecular Ecology Resources and our tool for spatially and temporally explicit coalescent simulations, gridCoal.
01.04.2022
Yohann Chauvier joined the group for a one year postdoc! Yohann will do some data mining of the GenDivRange database. Welcome!
24.02.2022
Group outing in Albis
From left to right:
Kati, Mert, Nicole, Haonan, Johannes, Petra, Ana (Anastazija Dimitrova, visiting student in the framework of the COST Action PenCaForr)
01.02.2022
Mert Celik joined the group for a PhD to work on Fagus population genetics in the framework of MyGardenOfTrees. Welcome Mert!
13.01.2022
The first participatory garden of MyGardenOfTrees is now set up next to our institute!
Visit www.mygardenoftrees.eu for more updates!
Thank you to everyone for the titanic effort with preparing the participatory parcels!
27.10.2021
We are launching the website of MyGardenOfTrees and the call for participants! Please visit our website at
01.10.2021
Haonan Yang joined the group for an internship to complete his MSc degree from the ETH Zurich. Haonan will work on improving the data quality and presentation of GenDivRange and also help with developing IT tools for MyGardenOfTrees.
Welcome Haonan!
27.09.2021
Johannes Alt joined the group for his MSc thesis (ETH Zurich, Environmental Sciences) tentatively entitled: Estimating the germination rate of commercial seed lots of European beech and silver fir. Johannes's work contributes to the MyGardenOfTrees project by estimating a baseline germination rate for the seed source populations that will be distributed to common gardens across Europe.
Welcome Johannes!
16.07.2021
Congratulations to Enikő for her manuscript in Molecular Ecology entitled "Fine-scale spatial genetic structure across the species range reflects recent colonization of high elevation habitats in silver fir (Abies alba Mill.)", well done!
01.07.2021
Dr Petra D'Odorico joined our group for a postdoc in remote sensing, physiology and genetics. She will lead the research project RemHybridMon in collaboration with Prof Merry Schuman.
Welcome Petra!
08.06.2021
MyGardenOfTrees: Nicole sent the first set of participant packages for the 2021 summer trials. Participants from Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Italy, Scotland, and Switzerland are following the germination and first survival of several provenances of silver fir and European beech. Here is the exciting content of a participant package and a micro-garden:
04.06.2021
We are back from the first field campaign of RemHybridMon in Nancy and Allenwiller! Great work Petra and Bea!
04.06.2021
Henry's presentation at IALE-NA 2021 Annual Meeting has been awarded the Best Student Presentation! Congratulations to Henry and to the whole DGS project team!
03.05.2021
Nicole Ponta (PhD) joined our group. Nicole will develop and manage the participatory network of MyGardenOfTrees and conduct field experiments.
Welcome Nicole!
12.04.2021
Henry presented our DGS Landscape Genetics group project at the IALE-North America meeting:
Hung, T. H., Rodríguez, P., Thompson, K., Mantovani, V., Miller, J. I., Nobis, M., Videvall, E., Csilléry, K. (2021. Apr 12–16). GenDivRange: A novel database of population genetic diversity and dispersal distance across a wide range of taxa to test the evolutionary determinants of species range limits. IALE-North America 2021 Annual Meeting. Online.
01.04.2021
Beatriz Pablo Carmona (MSc) joined our group for an internship. She will do field and lab work related to MyGardenOfTrees and RemHybridMon.
Welcome Bea!
22.02.2021
Two open positions in our lab:
Project coordinator in communication and forest science POSITION FILLED
Internship in forest quantitative genetics POSITION FILLED
15.02.2021
With our partners from INRAe Nancy, we obtained funding from Labex ARBRE to carry out a controlled drought stress experiment on European and oriental beech seedlings in 2021.
10.12.2020
See details about two newly funded projects:
ERC Consolidator Grant 2020: MyGardenOfTrees: A range-wide transplant experiment using participatory science and genomic prediction to assess local adaptation in forest trees
SwissForestLab project 2020: RemoteHybridMonitoring: Tracing hybridization of oriental beech following assisted gene flow: an approach combining high-throughput genomics, remote sensing and machine learning
9.12.2020
Our review on correlational selection is accepted in Nature Ecology and Evolution
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