Best Master Prize

Best master’s thesis award 2021

This year's best master’s thesis award was given to Elin Rütimann for her work entitled "The adaptive significance of the mimosoid bipinnate leaf ", conducted at the University of Zürich.

I investigate these general questions for one specialized leaf type, the bipinnate leaf in legumes, using the mimosoid legume genus Albizia, with 90 species, as a study group. Specifically, I aim to characterize bipinnate leaf variation and overall leaf morphospace, including developing several indices to quantify leaf dividedness, test whether the observed variation is associated with climate, biomes and geography, and explore the evolution of this quantitative leaf variation, to gain insights into the potential adaptive significance of the mimosoid bipinnate leaf. My results are very much in line with the idea that almost all plant traits have evolved multiple times independently and that this ability to repeatedly reinvent traits underpinned the evolutionary success of the flowering plants. Such scenarios of repeated evolution of traits linked to evolutionary success provide a powerful framework for understanding the links between phenotypic trait evolution and evolutionary diversification.