Over the next five years, Ulrike Herzschuh will be able to focus more strongly on the extinction of plant species and develop new methods and models for this purpose. The researcher from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam has been awarded a prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). This grant supports groundbreaking and high-risk research that could open up new scientific avenues. Her “plantExtinct” project will receive three million euros in funding.
Around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the tundra steppe collapsed and the largest animals – the so-called megafauna – disappeared. However, no plant extinctions were recorded. This phenomenon is known as the extinction paradox and has long occupied scientists – including Prof. Dr Ulrike Herzschuh of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). Herzschuh heads up the Polar Terrestrial Environmental Systems research group at the AWI’s Potsdam site and holds a joint professorship at the University of Potsdam.
Dr. Manja Schüle, Minister of Science, Research and Culture of the State of Brandenburg: “Ulrike Herzschuh’s research project ‘plantExtinct’ is far more than a retrospect of vanished ecosystems – it is research for the future. By analyzing species extinction during the last Ice Age, the project aims to develop new foundations for biodiversity conservation. The grant success is further evidence that the AWI, located on Brandenburg’s ‘smartest mountain,’ has for years been providing pioneering and indispensable impulses for international environmental and climate research. We have long known that Ulrike Herzschuh is outstanding – which is why we awarded her the State of Brandenburg’s Postdoc Prize back in 2007. Congratulations to Ulrike Herzschuh on this prestigious EU grant!”
“With ‘plantExtinct’, I am investigating whether these losses actually occurred but were invisible due to the fact that the limits of measurability obscured them,” as Ulrike Herzschuh states, explaining the motivation behind the new research project. “My ‘plantExtinct’ project uses sedimentary DNA from the past to uncover hidden plant losses, to sequence and model the genomes of extinct organisms, and to investigate, for example, how warming and the loss of megafauna drove extinction forward.”
Building on proven strengths in the fields of palaeogenomics and modelling, Ulrike Herzschuh’s “plantExtinct” project will provide new data, methods and models that will expand our fundamental understanding of species extinction. The aim is to establish practical foundations for the protection of biodiversity – for example, for seed banks or refuges, as well as for crop genomics.
The Laboratory for Palaeogenetics at the AWI in Potsdam specialises in the analysis of ancient sedimentary DNA (sedaDNA) from sediment cores or permafrost deposits. This enables the analysis of very ancient DNA samples, allowing conclusions to be drawn about the species composition dating back over hundreds of thousands of years ago. With the planned expansion of the laboratory to include the analysis of ancient proteins – funded in part by her 2024 Leibniz Prize – Ulrike Herzschuh hopes, in future, to not only investigate which species were present at a given location, but also what functions these species fulfilled within their respective ecosystems. The ERC Advanced Grant will then also enable her to investigate which functions in ecosystems are irretrievably lost with the extinction of species.
