The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin once again invited you to the Digital Science Communication Café. Get ready to get exciting insights from our scientist into their work while drinking coffee in front of the screens in a relaxed atmosphere.
For this edition, we invited Dr. Florencia Yannelli, a researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. In her current position, she is dedicated to understanding how certain alien #plants become invasive in cities. Alien invasive plants are more conspicuous than many of us realize, and though the term sounds like she is studying some sort of scary army of green creatures, these plants share our spaces with us in our cities, forests, crop lands, etc. They tend to be these beautiful "wild" flowering plants covering entire areas. Such species have been moved around by humans, sometimes on purpose for being of use, but others were introduced to a new area accidentally. Yet not all of them actually become a problem.
Florencia is interested in understanding what makes some of them successful invaders, in other words, how do they make it to dominate our ecosystems. Even if when dealing with plants we tend to think on what we see, looking a bit on the "underground" side, she studies the role that soil microbial communities might have in helping such species become invasive. All of this information is also useful to understand how we can effectively restore plant communities that have been invaded by these problematic aliens. During our conversation we will find out what are these invaders, how do they become invasive and what can we do about them – but most importantly we will discuss why we should care about them.
In the Experimental Field for Participation and Open Science, the #mfnberlin is testing various formats of research communication as well as new participatory approaches. As a space for direct interaction between science and citizens, we intend to open science to the public.
