NL TAF

SYNTHESYS FPVI NL TAF highlights

As of December 2007 50 peer-reviewed papers have already been published by FPVI funded NL-TAF Users. The researchers in NL-TAF are highly productive. During 2006, NL-TAF scientists and collaborators published 310 peer-reviewed papers and 127 books, book chapters, and CD-Roms.

Scientific achievements of Users of NL-TAF:

• Geographic patterns in the distribution of Palearctic songbirds identify hotspot regions for a global conservation strategy
• Fauna Malesiana Terrestica and Fauna Malesiana Marina: NNM/UVA co-operate in inventorying and describing the fauna of this biodiversity hot spot. Frequent fieldwork complements historical collections. Making assessment of changes in the faunal composition of selected habitats over a 100-year time frame.
• Flora Malesiana: International coorporation aimed at the inventory and description of the Flora of this biodiversity hotsspot in Asia. In 2007 volume 18 containing the Apocynaceae was finished.
• Discovery of a 20 million year old amber inclusion of a stingless bee carrying pollinia provides insight in the origin of the orchid family.
• Ancient DNA studies on permafrost preserved dung of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) which died 18,000 yr ago reveals the diet, season of death, and environment in which this animal died demonstrating the paleoecological potential of this new technique.
• The discovery of a novel phenomenon in the plant world: individual spores are explosively ejected from the sporangium by elastic forces generated in the spore wall.
• Discovery of the youngest undoubted Araucariaceae conifer fossil of the Northern Hemisphere (Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian type area).
• A new concept for the palaeoecology of the Dolomites in the Middle Triassic
• First systematic excavations on Mauritius for the reconstruction of the ecosystem of the Dodo.
• Development of techniques for the reconstruction of species boundaries over time and space, with Triturus newts as a model system
• Showing the presence of reproductive character displacement by inversion of coiling in clausiliid snails (Gastropoda, Pulmonata)
• Proving the existence of seasonal Amazonian rainfall variation in the Miocene climate optimum

For full list of SYNTHESY FPVI outputs click here.

NL TAF Member Institutions

Institution	Location	Website
Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)	Amsterdam, The Netherlands	science.uva.nl/zma
National Herbarium of the Netherlands (NHN)	Leiden, The Netherlands	www.nhn.leidenuniv.nl
National Museum Netherlands, Naturalis (NNM)	Leiden and Wageningen, The Netherlands	naturalis.nl