What’s up?

At the beginning of July, I travelled from Colorado to Florida (what a move to make for a climber in the middle of summer ;-)) to work on the Melastomataceae genus Rhexia (meadow beauties)! This is a small genus of only about 11...

I am lucky to get to the field twice this summer! 😀 The first fieldtrip featured joint work with Fabián Michelangeli and Juan Angulo from The New York Botanical Garden and Robín Hilario from Lima in the frame of the...

Closely related plant species frequently occur in sympatry and overlap in ecological characters. This overlap may lead to resource competition (i.e. for pollinators) and result in character displacement (i.e. divergence in...

Today is a big day in the world of Melastomataceae! 😀 Finally, after about two years of work, Melastomatologists across the world have put together 34 chapters in a book soon to be published by Springer! Special thanks to the...

This has been such a fun project! Thanks to José Valverde, whom I had the pleasure to co-advise during his licenciate thesis at Universidad de Costa Rica, we now know the pollinators of Meriania macrophylla! This species is...

In the frame of my new 3-year postdoc project "Modelling abiotic and biotic drivers of a plant radiation", I will spend one year at the University of Colorado Boulder working in tight collaboration with Stacey Smith! My first...

José did his licenciatura degree at the University of Costa Rica, working on the pollination biology of Meriania macrophylla. There, José confirmed yet another shift to passerine pollination in the Merianieae. He decided to...

I am happy to welcome Constantin Kopper as new PhD student in the Schönenberger lab! Constantin will be working with me on floral evolution and pollination syndromes in the plant family Melastomataceae, which contains more than...

All February, together with my colleague Florian Etl and the Tropical Field Station La Gamba, I will be tweeting about our ongoing research projects in the tropics! We will talk about unexpected discoveries, preliminary results,...