According to ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects in 2025, ecology is the most successful discipline at the University of Helsinki.
Research in the field of ecology at the University of Helsinki has improved in ranking from 12 to 8 in the Global Ranking of Academic Subjects in 2025 published by ShanghaiRanking. In 2023, the University was ranked 20th in the world.
In ecological research, the University of Helsinki is the leading university in Finland and the Nordic countries, and the fourth best in Europe. The classifications of disciplines used in the rankings are based on the groupings used by international scholarly journals.
What factors have boosted the University's ecological research to such heights?
"One important factor behind our success is that we have invested strategically in ecological research infrastructure, such as research stations," says Professor Craig Primmer, Dean of the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences.
Vice-Dean Sarah Butcher, who oversees research at the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, is pleased with the upward trend for the discipline of ecology towards the global top. According to Butcher, one factor is the marked increase in the number of scholarly publications in the field: from 2017 to 2020, the number of publications per year was approximately 511, while from 2021 to 2024 the number of ecology-themed publications had risen to roughly 961 per year.
According to Anna-Liisa Laine, Professor of Plant Biodiversity and Director of the Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Programme, the result is a clear indication of the difficulty of building top-level research from nothing.
"The exceptionally strong expertise in the field of ecology at the University of Helsinki serves as a solid foundation. At the same time, Finnish ecological data*, combined with methodological excellence, provide a starting point for research at the global top in terms of both publications and funding. We have also successfully advanced our efforts following the retirement of the previous generation, with effective recruitment bringing us new scholarly perspectives and methodological talent," says Laine.
Over the years, significant funding has been allocated to ecological research. Researchers at the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences have received several grants from the European Research Council (ERC) in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, as well as from Centres of Excellence and Academy Professorships funded by the Research Council of Finland.
Ecological research in 13 units
At the University of Helsinki, research in the discipline of ecology is conducted from a range of perspectives. Ecological research is carried out particularly at the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, which has several professorships in the field. Research in the field is also carried out, for example, at the Finnish Museum of Natural History, the Faculty of Science, the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, as well as the Helsinki Institute of Life Science (HiLIFE) and the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science HELSUS - all in all, in 13 different units of the University. Ecological research has therefore also been a key topic in several profile-building projects funded by the Research Council of Finland at the University of Helsinki.
