The new Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP) in Jena was established with the Herbarium Haussknecht and the Herbarium Senckenbergianum in early 2024. The core aim of SIP is to unite traditional natural history collections with modern, data-driven biodiversity research.
Four professorships and custodians with different backgrounds will collaborate to develop and apply new methods for studying biodiversity change and evolutionary processes on a high-resolution temporal and spatial scale. Together, they will assess species responses to environmental changes in the Anthropocene with expertise spanning Integrative Plant Taxonomy, (Functional) Plant Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution of Bryophytes, Digital Collectomics.
SIP was established in cooperation with the Friedrich Schiller University Jena: iDiv and SIP Connections and collaborations between iDiv and SIP are fostered through the people working at these institutes. Additionally, strategic projects, such as PhenObs2.0 and PlantHub, further strengthen this cooperation. For example, one of the aims of PhenOl bs2.0 is to expand the phenological network to herbaria and to develop automated methods for extracting phenological information from herbarium specimens. To support this effort, a joint workshop with several participating iDiv members will be held in Jena, benefitting from SIP expertise and funds.
SIP also provides infrastructure, which will be available to iDiv Members through cooperative projects, such as the (digital) vascular plant and cryptogam collections, expertise in taxonomy and systematics, functional plant biodiversity as well as informatics, digital microscopy facilities, and well-equipped molecular labs. Future interactions will strengthen connections between new SIP scientists with the iDiv family, extending beyond collections-based research.
Contact: christine.roemermann@uni-jena.de
