Research

The long-term research on the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia : Nymphalidae) was started in 1991, and ever since this large-scale project has provided the context within which much of the research on metapopulations has been conducted.

Another large project, initiated in 2003, is concerned with the adaptive radiation of tropical forest dung beetles in Madagascar and Borneo (revisited after 30 years). Since 2011, the group has collaborated with allergy specialists, molecular biologists, statisticians and immunologists in an exciting new project on the relationships between environmental biodiversity, human commensal microbiota and inflammatory diseases such as allergies.

Glanville fritillary butterfly genome project

The (Melitaea cinxia) is a medium-sized butterfly species distributed from southern Finland and Scandinavia across Europe to North Africa and Asia. We have sequenced the genome of the Glanville fritillary. The Glanville fritillary is the first butterfly species with the ancestral lepidopteran karyotype of 31 and for which both the genome and a high-density linkage map are now available. The sequencing was based on several outbred individuals using a hybrid sequencing strategy. Extensive validation shows that the assembly is of high quality (more information in Ahola et al. 2014, Supplementary Information).

Glanville fritillary butterfly: Ecological and evolutionary spatial dynamics

The long-term research on the (Melitaea cinxia) in the Åland Islandsin SW Finland was started in 1991. This study encompasses the entire distribution of the species in Finland in a network of ca 4,000 habitat patches (dry meadows) within an area of 50 x 70 km. The survey of all local populations in the entire network has provided a unique record of long-term and large-scale dynamics of a species inhabiting a fragmented landscape as well as material for specific observational and experimental studies.

In the recent years, several projects have examined the coupling between demographic and microevolutionary dynamics, and the ecological studies have been coupled with functional genomics studies.