Friederike Wölke - Personal Website

Hello, welcome! This is my personal website. I’m Friederike Johanna Rosa Wölke, everyone calls me Frieda. I’m a passionate biologist who loves to spends time with her houseplants and two cats.

Currently I’m doing my PhD in Prague, Czechia under the supervision of Petr Keil at his MOBI Lab (Modelling of Biodiversity Lab, https://petrkeil.github.io/) at the Czech Unviersity of Life Sciences (CULS/ČZU). For the next 4 years I will be investigating whether temporal change leaves characteristic imprints in static patterns of biodiversity. If such a universal pattern exists, it should allow us to estimate biodiversity change in regions lacking time-series data. Such universal imprints should exist, since declining species show a different spatial distribution pattern than expanding species. To investigate these kinetics of biodiversity change, we (the MOBI lab) will develop a new set of models for big and messy data combining machine learning, statistics and ‘all sorts of artifacts related to physical constraints, geometry, and scales of the world.’ (quote from MOBI lab website, September 2023)

Besides that, I’m still in close contact with my former research group (Evolution & Adaptation led by Renske Onstein @iDiv, Germany), where I did my Master’s thesis on the adaptivity of the evolution of very large fruits in animal-dispersed plants. During the time of my thesis, I fell deeply in love with evolutionary questions and ways to answer them from present day data (which - if you think logically - seems insane, no?! Crazy how it’s possible to reconstruct the past millions of years back from the patchy biased data that we have in the present). During this time, I spend many many hours questioning the correctness of the methods that I was using and ways to potentially identify biases that might have instead produced my results, because for me it really seemed inpossible for a computer to reconstruct the past like this from the data I gave it. However, after some time I realized that indeed, the methods I was using were not free from biases produced by silent excintions in the species records or increased speciation rates in small-fruited lineages towards the present - but that it’s really the closest we can get, and that still, the results are robust if double- and tripple- and quadruple-checked with several unrelated methods.

I think what my master thesis project really tought me was how to deal with insecurities about the data and methods and how to proceed if you don’t trust your data or the methods and consequently the results.

I’m currently collaborating on a fun project to investigate the drivers of the evolution of armature in plants in conjunction with the evolution of megaherbivores that feed on those plants.