In the Community Ecology group, team building doesn’t mean bowling or karaoke. Eric Allan prefers to take the group members foraging for mushrooms in the Bremgarten forest, on the edge of the city. At other times, the ten or so young researchers enjoy potluck dinners and because the group is very international this leads to exciting food and, appropriately for a group working on biodiversity, to high culinary diversity.
A Scotsman himself, Eric Allan is married to a Greek woman. He grew up in southern Scotland amidst meadows and fields, took an early interest in plants and studied biology at Oxford University. For his PhD at Imperial College in London, he investigated the impact of herbivores on grassland biodiversity. Since then, his research has focused on two main questions: Why is there so much biodiversity? And how does biodiversity influence the functions and services of ecosystems?
Eric came to Bern, via Germany, in 2011. During his postdoctoral studies at the German University of Jena, he had worked on the “Jena Experiment” – one of Europe’s longest-running biodiversity experiments. It was there that he met Markus Fischer, the renowned Bernese plant ecologist, who later offered him a postdoctoral position at the Institute of Plant Sciences. Eric’s task was to conduct synthesis of data from another large-scale project: the Biodiversity Exploratories. The Exploratories comprise a network of 300 plots, distributed along gradients of grassland use and forest management intensity, in three regions of Germany and have generated uniquely comprehensive biodiversity and ecosystem function datasets.