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Dr Julian Schrader has been awarded one of the European Research Council’s (ERC) coveted Starting Grants to study island plant life. The biologist will use the 1.5 million euros grant to investigate the interaction between climate change and the spread of plant species. To do this, he will relocate from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, to Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the German Centre for Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv). The ERC Starting Grant is one of Europe’s most prestigious research awards.
Climate change, changes in land use, and invasive species are causing problems for native plants worldwide. “All around the world, climate zones are increasingly shifting toward the poles – and with them the habitats of many species. The survival of plant species depends heavily on whether or not they can follow these movements. Yet, we still know very little about these migration processes, the underlying details, and their consequences for species communities,” says Dr Julian Schrader. The biologist aims to close this knowledge gap with his ERC-funded research project.
Schrader specialised in research on and about island a few years ago. “Around 20 per cent of all known plant species are found only on islands. Yet islands account for only around five per cent of the world’s land mass,” explains Schrader. In recent years, he has intensively studied the flora of more than 880 Australian islands. The ERC grant will help him to continue and expand this research. “My goal is to link data on the distribution of plant species with so-called functional traits. These include, for example, a plant’s height and the size and quantity of its seeds. I hope this will provide new insights into which species spread more effectively and are therefore more likely to colonise new areas,” says Schrader. This data could be used to make predictions about how biodiversity will develop on islands.
With the funding of the ERC Grant, Schrader is returning to Germany and will establish a working group at MLU and iDiv. “The Halle-Leipzig area is an extremely attractive environment for my research. Halle’s geobotany department has an outstanding reputation worldwide, and iDiv is a global leader in the synthesis of research data on biodiversity,” says Schrader. While his research project focuses on islands, the results could also contribute to a better understanding of the mainland. Later in his ERC project, Schrader will draw on the sPlot database which is one of the world’s most comprehensive databases on Earth’s vegetation containing around 2.5 million datasets. It is located at iDiv and headed by MLU-geobotanist Professor Helge Bruelheide.
Julian Schrader, born in 1988, is an internationally renowned biodiversity researcher. He became the head of the Plant Ecology Lab at Macquarie University in Sydney in 2023. Schrader is the author and co-author of more than 60 scientific studies published in journals such as “Nature”, “Global Change Biology” and “Ecology Letters”. He studied at the universities of Osnabrück and Göttingen. In 2019, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Göttingen with a thesis on coral islands in West New Guinea. He then moved to Australia on a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The European Research Council awards its ERC Starting Grants to outstanding postdoctoral researchers who have applied with proposals for ambitious and promising research projects. A total of just under 3,928 project proposals were submitted in this round of ERC Starting Grants, of which 478 were selected for funding across Europe. Just over 12 percent of the proposals will be funded.
Dr Julian Schrader has received an ERC Starting Grant.
Quelle: Cornelia Sattler
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