(top-left) MSc student Ryan McClory, Laura van Dijk and (soon) visiting PhD student Jessie Mutz study the impact of spring and autumn phenology on oak seedlings and their attackers. (top-right) Pil Rasmussen is finalizing her PhD this autumn, and only went outdoors to record the Plantago lanceolata demography at the Stockholm PlantPopNet site at the rocky beach. (bottom-left) Our project on coffee in southwestern Ethiopia is slowly becoming long-term: we distributed a fact sheet on coffee leaf rust (PDF in English, PDF in Afaan Oromo) and a t-shirt with a depiction of the coffee diseases during this year’s field survey; and we hired a new PhD student! (bottom-right) PhD student Alvaro Gaytán has been busy at night catching moths for a new project on the relationship between climate, voltinism and the food web on oak

Other major & minor events:

• Anna Barr successfully defended her master thesis on the effects of habitat and connectivity on the insect diversity of an urban oak community
• Biruk Nurihun will start as a PhD student in our new project ‘The relationship between climate, disease and coffee yield: optimizing management for smallholder farmers‘, which is funded by Research Area 7 from the Bolin Centre for Climate Research
• In late winter, MSc student Oliver Moss went to southwestern Ethiopia to measure coffee physiology, and BSc student Amelie Schober interviewed the local coffee farmers about their livelihood
• Erasmus student Giada Centenaro visited us this summer, and has been a great help to many of us!
• This summer, MSc student Tamiru Shimales has surveyed the insect community on coffee trees, and reared the leaf miner and its parasitoids; exciting to see what comes out!