Blog entry by Brian Dermody - PhD student


What brought about the fall of the Roman Empire? That is a question that has occupied Roman scholars for centuries. An equally important question is what enabled the Roman civilisation to last so long in a region of highly variable climate and dynamic landscapes?

Environmental Setting

The heart of the Roman Empire was the Mediterranean and its surrounding ecosystems. Much of Mediterranean is marginal for agriculture with low rainfall and highly variable climate making droughts and famine a real and constant threat. Equally, proxy data show that climate in the Mediterranean underwent long-term changes during the lifetime of the Roman Empire (Fig. 1). Land degradation was also a serious problem in the Roman period, particularly with a shift to large-scale farming in the Late Republican period to feed a growing urban populous. The impact of land degradation in Italy was outlined in the writings of Lucretius dating from 99 – 55 BC:

Blog entry by Mart Verwijmeren -  PhD student

Plant facilitation under drought and grazing stress

In our research project we look at how plants can work together to survive in very stressful environments. Much empirical work already showed that plants can facilitate each other’s survival in grazed or very dry environments. Big shrubs can for example protect young plants against grazers, thereby increasing survival of young plants. Also, big shrubs might provide shade to decrease drought stress for young neighbouring saplings. In my PhD project we look at how facilitation between plants might disappear when both grazing stress and drought stress become very severe. We expect that with increasing stress facilitation firstly becomes more important, but that at very high stress positive interaction will disappear again. Pinpointing the stress level at which facilitation wanes is crucial to better understand future land degradation in arid ecosystems. 

Blog entry by Floris Keizer - Junior Lecturer / Researcher

The marriage between the Environmental Sciences group of Utrecht University and one of the last undisturbed river floodplains in Central Europe has been a long one. Since the late 80’s, researchers from our group have visited the river floodplains and peatlands and brought it to the attention of the scientific community. The Biebrza valley in North-Eastern Poland is one of the last extensive undrained valley mires in Central Europe. The natural character of the valley peatlands is reflected in a very regular pattern of peat-forming plant communities (fig. 1).