Research interests

• Biodiversity - ecosystem functioning
• Landscape ecology
• Conservation biology
• Mammals and birds
• Temperate landscape mosaics
• Tropical rainforests

 

 

                     

Scientific projects

My research concerns the ecology, functional role and conservation of vertebrates (mammals and birds) under different scenarios of land use and climate change at national and international scales. Mammals and birds represent mobile links in landscapes, connecting habitat patches and providing important ecosystem services such as seed dispersal and control of herbivorous arthropods through predation. Moreover, they are associated with numerous parasites and pathogens and their high potential as reservoirs for emerging diseases makes some species of health concern for humans and companion animals. All these interactions take place under particular environmental conditions. Especially because of intensified land use and global change, animals experience dramatic increases in spatial and temporal variation in site conditions that translate into different survival rates, behaviour and movement decisions, species distributions and that may affect their role in ecosystem functioning.
Empirical investigations of such variation in animal occurrences and details of species interactions together with quantitative modelling approaches that allow solid predictions under different scenarios of environmental change are therefore a pivotal basis in science-based decisions in wildlife management.
With such background in mind, my research centres on population and community ecology, movement ecology, animal-plant and host-parasite interactions in natural populations of mammals and birds, emphasising the link between these fields for moving towards a mechanistic understanding of the underlying processes.

My research efforts take mainly place in tropical rainforests (Borneo, SE Asia; see Borneo illustrations ) and temperate landscape mosaics (Swabian Alb, Germany, Biodiversity Exploratories). My recent efforts included the construction of hierarchical models to better understand population dynamics and community patterns under variable environmental conditions as a postdoctoral fellow at the BIK-F in Frankfurt.