Meeting StEvE

Meeting StEvE 2024, organised by the Archeo- and Paleogenetics group, saw ~80 participants present during the entire day from across most EVEREST research groups, including many current BSc and MSc students. High quality oral (ten) and poster (six) presentations covered the diversity of the research on ecology and evolution conducted by EVEREST PhD students at the University of Tübingen, the University of Applied Forest Science in Rottenburg and the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen.

The Hilgendorf speaker of Meeting StEvE 2024 was Dr. Denise Kühnert head of the Transmission, Infection, Diversification & Evolution research group at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, and the Phylogenomics research group at the Centre for AI in Public Health Research, Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, who provided an exciting talk entitled "Tracking the evolution and epidemiology of infectious disease agents over months, years and millennia"

This year, every participant had the chance to vote for the presentation awards. The prize for the best poster presentation was awarded to Freya Steinhagen (Development of a workflow for the analysis of sedaDNA from cave site deposits), while the the prize for the best oral presentation had two equal winners, Gabriele Russo (Middle Paleolithic Hominin Ecology and Subsistence in the Central Levant) and Emily Gaul (Ancient Yersinia pestis genomes from the Lazzaretto Vecchio, plague hospital of Venice).

The meeting was characterised by many opportunities for scientific exchange following presentations, during coffee and lunch breaks as well as at the closing dinner at Neckarmüller!

The 2023 edition of “Meeting StEvE” hosted > 90 participants from across all EVEREST research groups, including many current BSc and MSc students who may enter the graduate program in the near future. Eleven oral and thirteen poster presentations covered the entire spectrum from ancient alligatoroid taxonomy and human prehistory to short-term dynamics of species interaction networks.  
Our Hilgendorf speaker, Prof. Marc Naguib from the University of Wageningen, provided highly engaging insights into the secrets of vocal communcation in brids, spanning from German great tits over Swiss nightingales to Australian zebrafinches, in a talk entitled “Birds in space and time: the role of communication and movement for understanding animal societies”.
Presentation quality of this year’s meeting StEvE was just stunningly high, imposing a difficult task on voters for presentation awards. The prize for the best oral presentation was awarded to Bram van der Schoot (“Enhanced predator detection by means of red fluorescence in a small fish species”), for the best poster presentation Frank Reis (“Drivers of natural microbiome variation in Lotus corniculatus”). Congratulations!

Different from previous editions, Meeting StEvE 2022 returned in a hybrid style allowing participants to join in presence and online. Organized by the Biogeology working group, the event counted more than 100 participants (64 in presence) including bachelor, masters and PhD students, as well as post-docs and professors from the University of Tübingen and collaborating institutes. A total of nine talks were presented along the three sessions of the event, followed by a dedicated session for the 11 posters that were displayed during the meeting.  

The Meeting StEvE 2022 also hosted a Hilgendorf Lecture with keynote speaker Prof. Eline Lorenzen of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Prof. Lorenzen gave an inspiring and exciting talk entitled “Arctic marine mammals in a post-Arctic world” about the dynamics of past and present populations of mammal species, in both marine and terrestrial environments, using ancient bimolecular analysis (including palaeogenomics and stable isotope analysis).

Finalizing the event, the prizes for the best presentation based on votes from the audience were awarded to Kim-Louise Krettek (best talk for “Genetic insights into the history of northern South America”) and Arianna Weingarten (best poster for “Ancient DNA retrieval from the Middle Pleistocene open-air site of Schöningen”). An after-meeting dinner at the Ratskeller to celebrate the successful event concluded the Meeting StEvE 2022.

In 2021, Meeting StEvE was organized by the Plant Ecology group. Similar to the year before, the meeting was a completely online event.

More than 70 people participated, including bachelors, masters and PhD students as well as faculty from the University of Tübingen and collaborating institutes. The program comprised 3 sessions with talks from EVEREST students with topics covering a wide variety of fields within evolution and ecology. As has become a tradition for Meeting StEvE, the audience was allowed to vote for the best presentation. Awards went to Vistorina Amputu (Remote sensing to assess rangeland condition), Leonie John (Body coloration of scorpionfish), and Dario Galanti (Natural epigenetic variation in plant defense).

The meeting was concluded by an inspiring keynote talk by Prof. Vigdis Vandvik from the University of Bergen who talked about combining altitudinal gradients and experiments to study global change impacts on plants. The meeting was concluded by a virtual meet-the-speaker event with Prof. Vandvik.

In 2020, Meeting StEvE was held as an entirely web-based remote conference for the first time on Fri 13 Nov.

More than 100 students and faculty from Tübingen and beyond joined an exciting opening lecture by Mark Moore. He illustrated how inferences from stone-flaking experiments on the cognitive abilities of early humans may suffer from biased assumptions. Participants then engaged in lively discussions with 15 EVEREST students, who gave stimulating oral or poster presentations about their current PhD projects. Prizes for the best poster went to Frank Reis (microbiome ecology), and for the best talks to Julia Geue (surrogacy in conservation prioritization), Franziska Koch (stability rules for species networks), and Sophie Habinger (paleoecology of pongin primates).

The PhD students in Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology have made this a highly professional event! Thanks to William Snyder, Eleonora Gargani, Li Li, Diana Marcazzan, Alba Motes Rodrigo, and Jordy Orellana Figueroa.