Project

MEIOSIS

Title

MEIOSIS: Museum spEcImens shed light in biOdiverSIty Shrinkage

Year

2023-2025

Funding

Host Institute

University of Ioannina (Biodiversity Conservation Lab - BCL)

Principal Investigator

Advisory Board & Collaborating Institutes

Prof. Vassiliki Kati -University of Ioannina, Department of Biological Applications & Technology, Biodiversity Conservation Lab, Greece

Dr. Eva Knop -University of Zurich, Switzerland

Prof. Consuelo De Moraes -Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH), Switzerland

Dr. Oliver Schweiger -Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Germany

Assoc. Prof. Brent Sewall -Temple University, USA

Dr. Maria Dimaki -Goulandris Natural History Museum, Greece

Other collaborators: Dr. Melissa WhitakerDr. Michael Greeff, Entomological Collection in Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH), Switzerland

 

Research Team

Konstantinos Anagnostellis-Technical Assistant

Marina Brokaki – Scientific Assistant

Eleutheria Kaltsouni – Diploma student (BCL)

The research project was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “3rd Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers” (Project Number 7191).

Predict the ecological traits that make butterflies adaptable to climate change

  • Model the decreasing body size of butterflies as a response to climate change across different environments.
  1. Test the relative importance of climate change in body size across different environments: time will serve as a proxy for the increasing temperature, and the location of specimens will serve as a proxy for a variety of geographical elements (e.g., elevation, latitude) and will define the type of the environment the specimen was collected from such as urban areas, agriculture areas, forests and grasslands.

  2. Address directional shifts in community structure: MEIOSIS expects that larger or cold-affinity species will “fly out” and smaller or warm-affinity species will “fly in” altering community structure and average community body size.

  • Map species’ traits that predict the ability of an organism to shrink/ adapt to climate change in relation to its environment.
  1. Test the relative importance of species traits (i.e., diet, distribution, voltinism) on shrinking body size and across different environments.

1.

Digitization & Body size measurements

2.

Data analysis

3.

Scientific paper writing

4.

Dissemination & Communication

Butterfly gallery: photos by @ D. Zografou

Lab gallery: Digitization and measurement of butterfly morphometric characteristic

In this section, we will upload gradually the project outputs, including open access databases, conferences talks or posters, popular science texts and briefs as well as media material

Databases

For the preparation of our primary database we need to process the digitized as well as the non-digitized material we have at our disposal:

  • Goulandris Natural History Museum (First collection). Collection is hosting ~6000 specimens
  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (Second collection). Collection is hosting ~ 50000 digitized specimens

Publications

Congresses/Symposiums/Meetings/Workshops

Zografou D. 2023. Butterflies and climate change. Invited speaker at the 17th Workshop for Post-graduate Students of Biology Department, 7 June 2023, University of Patras. More info here)

Zografou K, Anagnostellis K, Brokaki M, Dimaki M. 2023. MEIOSIS: Museum specimens shed light in biodiversity shrinkage, Helecos 11th National Ecological Conference, 4-7 October 2023, Patra, Greece. Poster. 

Science for Society

Open lectures

Open lectures will be held as mini-seminars. During the second year of the project (2024) one-day training webinars on the role of species traits and biodiversity body shrinkage to ecosystem functioning will be organized and conducted for the collaborator institutes, naturalists and students, to fruitfully transfer the acquired knowledge and the scientific output.

 

News/Press release

News on the MEIOSIS project, including notifications of new material published, articles in the press and other media, relevant policy impact posted in the BCL facebook page  and/or twitter @k_zografou.  Selected news is posted here

Press release for the collaboration between Goulandris Natural History museum and MEIOSIS. April 2023

Read the press release

Project Press Release |The first series of project progress is published. September 2023.

Read the press release

 

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