The Center Excellence for Agroecology and New Crops in Future Climates addresses the challenges of field agriculture in future climates and the non-sustainable ecological footprints of food production.
In 2024, the center of excellence participated in the nature observation marathon. Observations were made in the areas of partner institutions of the center of excellence, in the experimental fields of the Centre of Estonian Rural Research and Knowledge (METK) in Jõgeva and in the experimental fields of the Estonian University of Life Sciences near Tartu.
Looking for cowslips is a citizen science campaign that started in Estonia in 2019 and aims to collect information about the frequency of the different types of cowslip (Primula veris) flowers. The campaign was done in collaboration with Estonian Fund for Nature. In 2021, the campaign expanded across Europe and we worked with many partners across Europe. This widespread and belowed spring flower is heterostylous. This means it has two genetically determined types of flowers - S-morph and L-morph. S-morph has short style and long stamen, L-morph has long style and short stamen. The project calls out everyone interested to record the frequency of each morph in 100 flowers at one habitat. This is done, because naturally the frequency should be even and studying how and why the frequency changes helps us find out how cowslip and other species connected to it are doing.
The Estonian results from 2019 have been published as an open-access scientific article and the pan-European results of 2021 and 2022 have also been published as a scientific article.
Tsipe Aavik / tsipe.aavik@ut.ee / +372 516 1187
