Ever since I explored the surrounding forests with my grandfather as a kid, I wanted to become a botanist. Later, during my school years, I came into contact with plant species identification in the botanical garden in Karl Marx Stadt (fortunately, the city has been renamed to Chemnitz again) using the Rothmaler Flora. Today, together with my colleagues from Dresden, Halle, and Görlitz, I am one of the editors of the Rothmaler Flora volumes. Keeping its three books up to date is quite some work, but it also is a great source of knowledge for me to learn and understand more about our flora. So, I’m one of the really lucky ones who can live out their passion professionally, and I’m very grateful for that!
I studied Biology in Dresden and Jena, and also had some short stays in the US and Thailand. While I have always been drawn to botany, I am fascinated by evolutionary biology, especially by all the marvels of plant reproduction and transmission of chromosomes to offspring. This led me relatively deep into genetics and population biology.
For my PhD in Jena, I started to work with dogroses (Rosa sect. Caninae) and could not help but continue working on them. These prickly shrubs have some beautiful and fragrant flowers, but they are a nightmare for taxonomists. Their secret is that parents do not contribute equally to offspring, but the female lineages inherit four times more chromosomes than the male ones.
After my time as a postdoctoral researcher at the University Gießen, I started a position as curator for vascular plants at the Herbarium at the Senckenberg Museum in Görlitz in 2010. Here, we are increasingly opening our collections to researchers and citizen scientists using a range of approaches, such as establishing virtual herbaria. Our main goal is to expand the perspective on collections from archives of dried plants to integrated research platforms that go beyond taxonomy and contribute to answer urgent questions on biodiversity change driven by human activities.
As professor of the TU Dresden, I enjoy teaching in international Master’s programmes dedicated to biodiversity. I find it extremely rewarding to share my enthusiasm for evolutionary biology and nature conservation with students coming from all over the world, especially in field courses.
I have been an iDiv Member since 2023 and enjoy the possibilities of collaboration with colleagues interested in biodiversity at such a vast range of different levels, and I am looking forward to further exchange.
Contact: christiane.ritz@senckenberg.de