Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin (TCD) is Ireland’s highest ranked university. It was founded in 1592, and is home to 18,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students across all the major disciplines in the arts and humanities, and in business, law, engineering, science, and health sciences.
Department of Botany is a School under the Natural Sciences Faculty of Trinity College Dublin. The research of Botany covers the role of pollinating insects in ensuring a harvest in some major crop plants; the flux of gases in agricultural soils and their potential influences on climate change; the discovery of plant species new to science in the forests of South-east Asia and Central America; the sustainable treatment of sewage sludge and mining wastes; and the impacts of fire on Irish vegetation, over a timescale ranging from decades to millennia. Part of these activities finds a focus through the Trinity Centre for Biodiversity Research.
Botany members were and are currently involved in several national and EU research grants, with the most recent one:
Jane Stout's research expertise is in the field of ecology, with an emphasis on human impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and the value of nature to people. She seeks to understand the processes and consequences of changes in land management and non-native species invasions, using plant-pollinator interactions as a model system. There is global concern over loss of pollination services and her research informs biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture, both nationally and internationally. Her research programme at Trinity College Dublin is inter-disciplinary: her own expertise covers both botanical and zoological fields, but she also collaborates widely with geographers, socio-economists, chemists and molecular biologists, both nationally and internationally.
She employs field-based experimental studies combined with laboratory analyses to characterise insect behaviour, plant breeding systems, biodiversity and conservation of pollinators and their impacts on plant population dynamics. Jane is leading the PoshBee work package collecting data on agrochemical exposure that will go into the ALMaSS bee models and is providing valuable ecological expertise to the creation of the bumblebee model.
She is Chair of the Irish Forum on Natural Capital www.naturalcapitalireland.com and deputy Chair of the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan www.pollinators.ie.
