23 April 2010: Tina D'Hertefeldt

Gene flow in Brassica napus: effects on herbivory, ferality and the seed bank

Tina D'Hertefeldt

dept. Plant Ecology and Systematics, Lund University, Sweden


Worldwide cultivation of oilseed rape (Brassica napus), which is second only to soybean for oil production, covered 28 million hectares in 2008. In Sweden, oilseed rape was grown on 110 000ha. With large land areas devoted to oilseed rape production, the crop becomes highly important to both natural and agricultural ecosystems. B. napus has been implemented as a species with high capacity for both volunteer and feral population establishment due to large seed production, long-term seed dormancy and potential for out-crossing with wild relatives.
The wild relative B. rapa ssp. sylvestris which was previously a common agricultural weed is now assumed to be threatened. Furthermore, varieties of genetically modified oilseed may be cultivated in the EU countries in future and it is therefore important to evaluate the effect of potential B. napus gene flow on wild B. rapa. The effects of increased insect resistance on wild B. rapa, and the roles of feral B. napus and the B. napus seedbank in spatial and temporal B. napus gene flow will be discussed.

09 April 2010: Honor Prentice

Studying diversity in a messy reality:
genes and species, ecology and adaptation, history and landscapes

Honor Prentice

dept. Plant Ecology and Systematics, Lund University, Sweden


Grassland ecosystems are beautiful, complex and extremely challenging to study. The structure of genetic variation within and between populations and its relationships with stochastic and adaptive processes on different spatial and temporal scales; the relationships between species richness and environmental, stochastic, historical and spatial processes; the relationships between genetic variation and plant community composition – how does everything fit together? Does it all fit together? I suggest that conservation biology in general, and conservation genetics in particular, should pay more attention to the possibility of local adaptation. And that studies of associations between biodiversity and environmental or historical variables need to include simultaneous analysis of a range of variables.