Welcome at the Faculty Centre of Biodiversity (former Institute of Botany and Botanical Garden), University Vienna.

Mission statement

Diversity pertains to all organisational levels of life, from the regional, landscape and habitat scale, across species, populations and individuals, to genes and their products. The five Departments of the Center for Biodiversity Research of the Faculty of Life Sciences together with the Botanical Garden share the common goal of improving understanding of biodiversity at all relevant ecological and evolutionary dimensions in space and time, and to disseminate this knowledge. We are especially interested in the diversity of biological structures, including features of species and landscape diversity, plus how biodiversity originates and changes over space and time (e.g., evolution, phylogeography, radiation). Combining expertise from ecology, evolutionary biology, and spatial analysis, and by investigating plants, fungi, and animals, our aim is to develop an international center of excellence based on broad interdisciplinary research. Because biodiversity is currently threatened by numerous human impacts on the biosphere, an important aspect of our work is development and improvement of science-based rationales for management and conservation of biological resources.