More big news! Some time ago I wrote a research project to test the geographic mosaic of coevolution using some South African plants and their pollinators as model system. The idea is to assess how the community composition of plants and pollinators affect the strength of the ecological interaction between each focus plant and their pollinators, and how this reflects on the tightness of their coevolution. The South Africans (specifically the Leon Foundation) liked it and funded it. After a bit of thinking, the Swiss (SNF) decided that they liked it too, and they funded it as well. So in May I will move to SA to work on my project, together with prof. Bruce Anderson and prof. Steve Johnson, with funding for up to three years and a half.

In the meantime I am spending some of these gap months travelling in Borneo for a personal project which I started thinking about two years ago, the first time I came on the island. On that first visit, Borneo struck me as a land of contrasts, with primeval rainforests threatened by logging and oil palm plantations. Back then I was reading “Stranger in the Forest”, a book that tells the adventures of Eric Hansen, a journalist who in 1982 walked across the island on foot. I am using this book as an inspiration and a reference to see how Borneo changed in the last 30 years. Follow my Bornean walkabout here!