Welcome to my page!
News
April 2019 - I feel very honored to receive an award from the University of Vienna for my publication output (at my first day back in office after IBOC, see March update). The YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD is given annually to young scientists who publish in the top journals of their field and I already have plans to invest the award funding of 7000 EUR to several activities related to research outreach, open science and science communication in my projects. Thank you University of Vienna for this recognition!
Our special issue on "Implementation Spaces in Conservation Science" for Biological Conservation is making great progress as well! We received many submissions and currently work on the selection of manuscripts for this special issue to provide a balanced mix of contributions from different disciplines, biogeographic areas and socio-ecological systems.
I am also working on the data analyses from our REGRASS project in Austria, as well as on the submission of research projects in Peru, Costa Rica, Italy and Greece - all related to better understanding and management of biodiversity and related ecosystem services that will involve local stakeholders and relevant decision makers. We are busy right now with these projects and are looking forward to report more about them soon!
March 2019 - I report freshly back from the IBOC conference in Israel, which was an amazing experience! I am thankful for the invitation of the organizers to give a keynote talk and that I got to know all the inspiring people and their projects at IBOC. I was particularly impressed by the activities of the SPNI to involve local communities in conservation action and events, and I recommend all bird and conservation lovers to check out their projects - especially Champions of the Flyway!
Feb 2019 - The year started with some complications that I had to cope with due to a serious jaw infection as a result of a wisdom teeth surgery. After almost three months of struggle I am back in the game and look forward to the many activities planned for this year. Please stay tuned!
Therefore I had to give my contribution to the Quantitative Ecology Workshop in Yaounde from my sick bed in Vienna - which was possible thanks to the great support of my colleagues in Africa! A thousand thanks for that. The symposium we submitted to ATBC 2019 was accepted and you can look forward to a great event on Sustainable tropical agroforestry: Balancing biodiversity and crop yield through ecosystem services!
December 2018 - Last month of this year and many great news to share! Two new articles are out: Our mini-review on "Experimental exclosure of birds and bats in agrcultural systems" and an editorial to celebrate the 50 Years of Biological Conservation. Another editorial on the hot debate about habitat fragmentation effects on biodiversity is accepted and will be available online soon!
Further, we finally started with the special issue on "Implementation Spaces in Conservation Science" to be published in Biol.Cons. next year - and opened the call for papers! Please feel free to share this call with your colleagues.
I look forward to 2019 with great anticipation - final year of the REGRASS project, trips to new places and countries (e.g., keynote at IBOC conference in Eilat; Quantitative Ecology Workshop in Yaounde; ATBC2019 in Madagascar!) which will hopefully result in many new publications and new contacts! I wish you all happy and relaxing holidays and a good start to the New Year!
Oct/Nov 2018 - October and November have been quite difficult. On 28th September 2018, strong earthquakes and a tsunami hit the city of Palu in Central Sulawesi, which is like a second home for me. Within few days, former students and people from Palu started the campaign #HELP4PALU to collect donations and help close friends and their families in Sulawesi. We invested lots of time and energy in this project and even could create some media attention [blogs; press; radio] for it which resulted in > 24,000 EUR collected to help our friends and their families in Palu! The work on #Help4Palu will continue until January 2019, which presents a real challenge in addition to hours of weekly teaching, job interviews and complications in projects... Altogether a very challenging end of the year helping me to train focus and gratitude.
September 2018 - The GfÖ conference was hosted by BOKU Vienna this year - what a great opportunity to welcome friends and colleagues in my hometown, and present some fresh results from our ongoing projects in Austria! We presented posters to introduce our REGRASS project to the scientific community, and show first insights from the field. In addition, I gave a talk in the event "From Science to Practice", showing preliminary results from the questionnaire surveys I conducted this summer ('Understanding farmer perceptions of biodiversity and ecosystem services to improve biodiversity conservation and research communication') - please stay tuned on this. The GfÖ was very inspiring in terms of new contacts and inputs on my work and I directly started working on the manuscripts - looking forward to share the results with all of you asap.
August 2018 - I was invited to Taiwan to give a keynote speech at the first international Conference on Eco-Friendly Farming and Farmland Ecology (ECO-FF) - an impressively well-organized event, including many inspring discussions, interviews, and field trips to organic farming sites. My personal recommendation is to listen to the talk of Prof. Tyrone Hayes, who talked about the effects of Atrazine (a commonly used herbicide) on frogs - but also other vertebrates, and humans!
AND: New Article published by the SESYNC network, lead by Daniel Karp! See my CV & Publications for more detailed updates on publications and conferences, please :)
July 2018 - It was very exciting to organize and chair a symposium at the ATBC 2018 on "implementation gaps in conservation science" - we already work on outcomes of this fruitful event, including an upcoming special issue in Biological Conservation.
May/June 2018 - early summer started with lots of field work in Lower Austria for the REGRASS project, a project kickoff in Peru (DiFFcacao) and an Editorial Board Meeting of Biological Conservation in Amsterdam! While writing manuscripts and project proposals, I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming ATBC conference in Malaysia (where I will host a symposium on the implementation gaps in conservation research) and a invited keynote speech I will give at the "International Conference on Eco-Friendly Farming and
Farmland Ecology" in Taipei/Taiwan in August this year. Also, I am very keen to receive feedback and decisions on submitted project proposals on ecosystem services in tropical and temperate agriculture landscapes this summer and look foward to the GfOe conference in September, which will be in my hometown Vienna! :) Please stay tuned and feel free to get in touch if you're interested in more details or collaboration!
April 2018 - I am very pleased to inform you that we have published a bilingual and richly illustrated book about the results of our ecosystem service research in cacao agroforestry systems in Central Sulawesi (Indonesia), which is available here for free download and purchase: https://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de/handle/3/isbn-978-3-86395-352-2?locale-attribute=en. This booklet is the results on many years of close cooperation and workshops with cacao smallholder farmers and was produced to translate our scientific findings and management r ecommendations to the public and various stakeholders.
March 2018 - I'm pleased to announce that a new paper on avian ecosystem services is out now in BioScience. [see my publication list for further information] We investigate the functional relationships of avian ecosystem services and population abundance - including implications for management and the identification of relevant tipping points in relation to defaunation resilience, biodiversity conservation, and human well-being. The global biodiversity crisis is not simply one of species loss - also declining numbers of species are alarming!
January 2018 - HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you! I'm very happy to share some good news right at the start of this new year: Two new publications are out, on the current hot debate of biodiversity declines on local VS global scales (in Biological Conservation) and on the functional relationship of bird mediated ecosystem services and abundance (in BioScience). Further, our cooperation with Peru finally received funding so that we will start very soon (April 2018) with a nation-wide research project on pollination and pest control services in Peruvian cacao. And I'm looking forward to an exciting ATBC conference in Kuching this July, where I will lead a symposium entitled "Making Science Matter - from conservation research to implementation" that will contribute to exciting new collaborations and a special issue in Biological Conservation! So, please stay tuned - this year starts very promising and I'm sure with many activities and news to look forward to :)
October 2017 - This year is coming to an end and I am equally enthusiastic about the great progress we have made in our research projects (see below) as well as a bit disappointed that none of my publications currently under review (rather stuck in review) has managed to see the light of day - but hopefully all that will happen soon and I'm looking forward to share more news with you soon! Only that much to tell: two new research projects have been submitted, one more is almost finished, I will soon submit a symposium for the ATBC 2018 and the data analyzes of REGRASS project are already running - stay tuned and take care.
September 2017 - Very excited to give my first invited keynote speech on "Birds, bats and arthropods in forests and agro-ecosystems: diversity patterns, multitrophic interactions and ecosystem services" at the FrEE symposium at Silwood Park Campus (Imperiaal College London)! It was an amazing and highly inspiring experience to talk to the scientists and students presenting there.
July 2017 - Finally, back with some news! The last two months passed so quickly with the intensive REGRASS field work and our wedding in June (!) ... and with our project plans and applications for Peru and Costa Rica. >>> The application for Costa Rica has been submitted again (please press thumbs!) and Peru will hopefully submitted soon for review. >>> And then, to my great joy, the BIOC special issue on "Small Natural Features" which I have edited was published - together with a very nice article in the Washington Post. >>> Between 09 and 14 July, I attended the ATBC Meeting in Mexico - which was just great (great talks and debates and such a great country!) ... and also quite successful. So I am already looking forward to the ATBC 2018 in Kuching, Malaysia ... I plan two symposia for this meeting. And in a few weeks I will probably report from London and Budweis, from the guest lectures I was invited to give there. Still a few more great things have evolved ... but everything in its time. See you soon again;) Greetings!
March/April 2017 - very busy and happy with the progress of the fieldwork of the REGRASS project in Lower Austria, my teaching activities at the University of Vienna (CVL group), as well as the publication of the first issue of PECON (please consider this new journal for publication of your research) and a publication in Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. The year starts very promising! More news to come very soon (hopefully) - please stay tuned.
January 2017 - a happy New Year to all of you! Besides a few relaxing holidays there was a lot of writing work during Christmas and I hope I'm able to share the results quite soon. I want to get even more involved in the socio-ecological and socio-political sphere - already excited to get started! AND last but not least: I joined the editorial board of Perspectives in Ecology (PECON) - so I have much to look forward to...
December 2016 - New Affiliation! I started my postdoc in the project "Re-establishing grasslands to promote farmland biodiversity and key ecosystem services", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and carried out in cooperation between the Division of Conservation Biology, Vegetation Ecology and Landscape Ecology (CVL, University of Vienna) and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU). I'm looking forward to at least four exciting years in this project and on our experimental fields in Lower Austria!
--- for previous research activities, please check "CV & Publications" ---
Research Interests
My main interests as ecologist focus on the investigation of biodiversity patterns, species communities and associated functions in relation to their environment and the respective landscape design. In my research projects, I combine approaches from the scientific fields of Community Ecology, Landscape Ecology, Biodiversity Conservation and Agroecology. In particular, I focus on ecosystem services, community-level responses to habitat transformation and innovative approaches for sustainable resource use and biodiversity conservation.
During my studies of biology at the University of Vienna (Austria), I had the opportunity to learn and participate in a variety of ecological research projects with both botanical and zoological focus - reaching from the Austrian Alps and various other nature reserves to the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica. For my diploma (Department of Population Ecology, University of Vienna), I investigated the effects of long-term habitat modification on avian communities and their functional diversity in Indonesian forest margin areas. I continued my research activities in Indonesia as PhD of the Agroecology Group (University of Goettingen, Germany), using large-scale exclosure experiments of birds and bats to study ecosystem services, multitrophic interactions and agricultural productivity, in relation to species diversity, ecological functions and human well-being. In 2014, I returned to the University of Vienna (Department of Biodiversity Research; CVL insitute) from where I continue my research on ecosystem services in temperate and tropical ecosystems and other activities related to agroecological research and its practical implementation in conservation and land use (check out my News feed above, CV&Publications as well as current teaching activities).
I am interested (1) to understand how faunal communities and associated ecosystem services are related to different landscape design, management regimes and environmental features; (2) to identify optimal conditions for the applied management of these services - ideally both for the benefit of human well-being and with respect to species conservation; and (3) to unravel how local management and landscape design affect the diversity of species, functionally important taxonomic groups, and ultimately, their trophic interactions and/or plant productivity.
In this context, I am committed to both the in-depth scientific study of these questions, as well as to their translation to the public, being involved in several projects dedicated to public awareness, the conservation of (endangered) biodiversity and agricultural sustainability.
Other Activities
Associate Editor of Biological Conservation
Asscociate Editor of Perspectives in Ecology and Evolution
Peer review for the following journals: Acta Chiropterologica; Agroforestry Systems; Biological Conservation; Biotropica; Bat Conservation International (BCI small grants); Community Ecology; Journal of Applied Ecology; Journal of Pest Science; PloS One; Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences; Scientific Reports (Nature); Tropical Conservation Science
Volunteering: Cooperation with smallholder cacao farmers in Central Sulawesi (2010 - 2018) to communicate research results of my PhD and the benefits of biodiversity and ecosystem services to the local farmer community and cacao stakeholders. I conducted several cacao farmer workshops between 2010 and 2014, translated a book for famers into Bahasa Indonesia (local language) and cooperate with the Tadulako University in Palu (lectures and student courses). Beyond that, I organized interdisciplinary lectures in Germany and give talks at different institutions in Europe and Indonesia to increase the awareness towards biodiversity-friendly landscape management, taking into account ecosystem services and feedback from local communities.
Further voluntary activities (selection):
Monitoring and banding of birds for WWF Austria, IFV Helgoland, BirdLife International and Auring e.V.
Translation work for nature conservation NGO's (e.g., The Orang-Utan Project in Sumatra; Ecotourism Bureau Malia Tours Sulawesi)
Volunteer at 'Lebenshilfe e.V.' (home for the handicapped; Austria)
Volunteer at ABNÖ (Niederösterreichische Berg,- und Naturwacht; training of rescue dogs)
Memberships: BirdLife; OBC (Oriental Bird Club); ATBC (Association for Tropical Biology
and Conservation); gtö (Society for Tropical Ecology); DO-G (Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft); IEP (International Elephant Project); ProRing e.V.; ÖAV (Österreichischer Alpenverein e.V.) and DAV (Deutscher Alpenverein e.V.); ABA (Austrian Biologist Association)
Last but not least, I like to think outside the box and to discover new challenges.
Besides the science, I am passionate about all mountain activities (hiking, climbing, slacklining),
dog training, journalistic and creative writing, photography, art, culture and creativity
from all over the world!
Let's enjoy and commit ourselves to a wonderful world.
April 2019 - I feel very honored to receive an award from the University of Vienna for my publication output (at my first day back in office after IBOC, see March update). The YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD is given annually to young scientists who publish in the top journals of their field and I already have plans to invest the award funding of 7000 EUR to several activities related to research outreach, open science and science communication in my projects. Thank you University of Vienna for this recognition!
Our special issue on "Implementation Spaces in Conservation Science" for Biological Conservation is making great progress as well! We received many submissions and currently work on the selection of manuscripts for this special issue to provide a balanced mix of contributions from different disciplines, biogeographic areas and socio-ecological systems.
I am also working on the data analyses from our REGRASS project in Austria, as well as on the submission of research projects in Peru, Costa Rica, Italy and Greece - all related to better understanding and management of biodiversity and related ecosystem services that will involve local stakeholders and relevant decision makers. We are busy right now with these projects and are looking forward to report more about them soon!
March 2019 - I report freshly back from the IBOC conference in Israel, which was an amazing experience! I am thankful for the invitation of the organizers to give a keynote talk and that I got to know all the inspiring people and their projects at IBOC. I was particularly impressed by the activities of the SPNI to involve local communities in conservation action and events, and I recommend all bird and conservation lovers to check out their projects - especially Champions of the Flyway!
Feb 2019 - The year started with some complications that I had to cope with due to a serious jaw infection as a result of a wisdom teeth surgery. After almost three months of struggle I am back in the game and look forward to the many activities planned for this year. Please stay tuned!
Therefore I had to give my contribution to the Quantitative Ecology Workshop in Yaounde from my sick bed in Vienna - which was possible thanks to the great support of my colleagues in Africa! A thousand thanks for that. The symposium we submitted to ATBC 2019 was accepted and you can look forward to a great event on Sustainable tropical agroforestry: Balancing biodiversity and crop yield through ecosystem services!
December 2018 - Last month of this year and many great news to share! Two new articles are out: Our mini-review on "Experimental exclosure of birds and bats in agrcultural systems" and an editorial to celebrate the 50 Years of Biological Conservation. Another editorial on the hot debate about habitat fragmentation effects on biodiversity is accepted and will be available online soon!
Further, we finally started with the special issue on "Implementation Spaces in Conservation Science" to be published in Biol.Cons. next year - and opened the call for papers! Please feel free to share this call with your colleagues.
I look forward to 2019 with great anticipation - final year of the REGRASS project, trips to new places and countries (e.g., keynote at IBOC conference in Eilat; Quantitative Ecology Workshop in Yaounde; ATBC2019 in Madagascar!) which will hopefully result in many new publications and new contacts! I wish you all happy and relaxing holidays and a good start to the New Year!
Oct/Nov 2018 - October and November have been quite difficult. On 28th September 2018, strong earthquakes and a tsunami hit the city of Palu in Central Sulawesi, which is like a second home for me. Within few days, former students and people from Palu started the campaign #HELP4PALU to collect donations and help close friends and their families in Sulawesi. We invested lots of time and energy in this project and even could create some media attention [blogs; press; radio] for it which resulted in > 24,000 EUR collected to help our friends and their families in Palu! The work on #Help4Palu will continue until January 2019, which presents a real challenge in addition to hours of weekly teaching, job interviews and complications in projects... Altogether a very challenging end of the year helping me to train focus and gratitude.
September 2018 - The GfÖ conference was hosted by BOKU Vienna this year - what a great opportunity to welcome friends and colleagues in my hometown, and present some fresh results from our ongoing projects in Austria! We presented posters to introduce our REGRASS project to the scientific community, and show first insights from the field. In addition, I gave a talk in the event "From Science to Practice", showing preliminary results from the questionnaire surveys I conducted this summer ('Understanding farmer perceptions of biodiversity and ecosystem services to improve biodiversity conservation and research communication') - please stay tuned on this. The GfÖ was very inspiring in terms of new contacts and inputs on my work and I directly started working on the manuscripts - looking forward to share the results with all of you asap.
August 2018 - I was invited to Taiwan to give a keynote speech at the first international Conference on Eco-Friendly Farming and Farmland Ecology (ECO-FF) - an impressively well-organized event, including many inspring discussions, interviews, and field trips to organic farming sites. My personal recommendation is to listen to the talk of Prof. Tyrone Hayes, who talked about the effects of Atrazine (a commonly used herbicide) on frogs - but also other vertebrates, and humans!
AND: New Article published by the SESYNC network, lead by Daniel Karp! See my CV & Publications for more detailed updates on publications and conferences, please :)
July 2018 - It was very exciting to organize and chair a symposium at the ATBC 2018 on "implementation gaps in conservation science" - we already work on outcomes of this fruitful event, including an upcoming special issue in Biological Conservation.
May/June 2018 - early summer started with lots of field work in Lower Austria for the REGRASS project, a project kickoff in Peru (DiFFcacao) and an Editorial Board Meeting of Biological Conservation in Amsterdam! While writing manuscripts and project proposals, I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming ATBC conference in Malaysia (where I will host a symposium on the implementation gaps in conservation research) and a invited keynote speech I will give at the "International Conference on Eco-Friendly Farming and
Farmland Ecology" in Taipei/Taiwan in August this year. Also, I am very keen to receive feedback and decisions on submitted project proposals on ecosystem services in tropical and temperate agriculture landscapes this summer and look foward to the GfOe conference in September, which will be in my hometown Vienna! :) Please stay tuned and feel free to get in touch if you're interested in more details or collaboration!
April 2018 - I am very pleased to inform you that we have published a bilingual and richly illustrated book about the results of our ecosystem service research in cacao agroforestry systems in Central Sulawesi (Indonesia), which is available here for free download and purchase: https://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de/handle/3/isbn-978-3-86395-352-2?locale-attribute=en. This booklet is the results on many years of close cooperation and workshops with cacao smallholder farmers and was produced to translate our scientific findings and management r ecommendations to the public and various stakeholders.
March 2018 - I'm pleased to announce that a new paper on avian ecosystem services is out now in BioScience. [see my publication list for further information] We investigate the functional relationships of avian ecosystem services and population abundance - including implications for management and the identification of relevant tipping points in relation to defaunation resilience, biodiversity conservation, and human well-being. The global biodiversity crisis is not simply one of species loss - also declining numbers of species are alarming!
January 2018 - HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you! I'm very happy to share some good news right at the start of this new year: Two new publications are out, on the current hot debate of biodiversity declines on local VS global scales (in Biological Conservation) and on the functional relationship of bird mediated ecosystem services and abundance (in BioScience). Further, our cooperation with Peru finally received funding so that we will start very soon (April 2018) with a nation-wide research project on pollination and pest control services in Peruvian cacao. And I'm looking forward to an exciting ATBC conference in Kuching this July, where I will lead a symposium entitled "Making Science Matter - from conservation research to implementation" that will contribute to exciting new collaborations and a special issue in Biological Conservation! So, please stay tuned - this year starts very promising and I'm sure with many activities and news to look forward to :)
October 2017 - This year is coming to an end and I am equally enthusiastic about the great progress we have made in our research projects (see below) as well as a bit disappointed that none of my publications currently under review (rather stuck in review) has managed to see the light of day - but hopefully all that will happen soon and I'm looking forward to share more news with you soon! Only that much to tell: two new research projects have been submitted, one more is almost finished, I will soon submit a symposium for the ATBC 2018 and the data analyzes of REGRASS project are already running - stay tuned and take care.
September 2017 - Very excited to give my first invited keynote speech on "Birds, bats and arthropods in forests and agro-ecosystems: diversity patterns, multitrophic interactions and ecosystem services" at the FrEE symposium at Silwood Park Campus (Imperiaal College London)! It was an amazing and highly inspiring experience to talk to the scientists and students presenting there.
July 2017 - Finally, back with some news! The last two months passed so quickly with the intensive REGRASS field work and our wedding in June (!) ... and with our project plans and applications for Peru and Costa Rica. >>> The application for Costa Rica has been submitted again (please press thumbs!) and Peru will hopefully submitted soon for review. >>> And then, to my great joy, the BIOC special issue on "Small Natural Features" which I have edited was published - together with a very nice article in the Washington Post. >>> Between 09 and 14 July, I attended the ATBC Meeting in Mexico - which was just great (great talks and debates and such a great country!) ... and also quite successful. So I am already looking forward to the ATBC 2018 in Kuching, Malaysia ... I plan two symposia for this meeting. And in a few weeks I will probably report from London and Budweis, from the guest lectures I was invited to give there. Still a few more great things have evolved ... but everything in its time. See you soon again;) Greetings!
March/April 2017 - very busy and happy with the progress of the fieldwork of the REGRASS project in Lower Austria, my teaching activities at the University of Vienna (CVL group), as well as the publication of the first issue of PECON (please consider this new journal for publication of your research) and a publication in Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. The year starts very promising! More news to come very soon (hopefully) - please stay tuned.
January 2017 - a happy New Year to all of you! Besides a few relaxing holidays there was a lot of writing work during Christmas and I hope I'm able to share the results quite soon. I want to get even more involved in the socio-ecological and socio-political sphere - already excited to get started! AND last but not least: I joined the editorial board of Perspectives in Ecology (PECON) - so I have much to look forward to...
December 2016 - New Affiliation! I started my postdoc in the project "Re-establishing grasslands to promote farmland biodiversity and key ecosystem services", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and carried out in cooperation between the Division of Conservation Biology, Vegetation Ecology and Landscape Ecology (CVL, University of Vienna) and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU). I'm looking forward to at least four exciting years in this project and on our experimental fields in Lower Austria!
--- for previous research activities, please check "CV & Publications" ---
Research Interests
My main interests as ecologist focus on the investigation of biodiversity patterns, species communities and associated functions in relation to their environment and the respective landscape design. In my research projects, I combine approaches from the scientific fields of Community Ecology, Landscape Ecology, Biodiversity Conservation and Agroecology. In particular, I focus on ecosystem services, community-level responses to habitat transformation and innovative approaches for sustainable resource use and biodiversity conservation.
During my studies of biology at the University of Vienna (Austria), I had the opportunity to learn and participate in a variety of ecological research projects with both botanical and zoological focus - reaching from the Austrian Alps and various other nature reserves to the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica. For my diploma (Department of Population Ecology, University of Vienna), I investigated the effects of long-term habitat modification on avian communities and their functional diversity in Indonesian forest margin areas. I continued my research activities in Indonesia as PhD of the Agroecology Group (University of Goettingen, Germany), using large-scale exclosure experiments of birds and bats to study ecosystem services, multitrophic interactions and agricultural productivity, in relation to species diversity, ecological functions and human well-being. In 2014, I returned to the University of Vienna (Department of Biodiversity Research; CVL insitute) from where I continue my research on ecosystem services in temperate and tropical ecosystems and other activities related to agroecological research and its practical implementation in conservation and land use (check out my News feed above, CV&Publications as well as current teaching activities).
I am interested (1) to understand how faunal communities and associated ecosystem services are related to different landscape design, management regimes and environmental features; (2) to identify optimal conditions for the applied management of these services - ideally both for the benefit of human well-being and with respect to species conservation; and (3) to unravel how local management and landscape design affect the diversity of species, functionally important taxonomic groups, and ultimately, their trophic interactions and/or plant productivity.
In this context, I am committed to both the in-depth scientific study of these questions, as well as to their translation to the public, being involved in several projects dedicated to public awareness, the conservation of (endangered) biodiversity and agricultural sustainability.
Other Activities
Associate Editor of Biological Conservation
Asscociate Editor of Perspectives in Ecology and Evolution
Peer review for the following journals: Acta Chiropterologica; Agroforestry Systems; Biological Conservation; Biotropica; Bat Conservation International (BCI small grants); Community Ecology; Journal of Applied Ecology; Journal of Pest Science; PloS One; Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences; Scientific Reports (Nature); Tropical Conservation Science
Volunteering: Cooperation with smallholder cacao farmers in Central Sulawesi (2010 - 2018) to communicate research results of my PhD and the benefits of biodiversity and ecosystem services to the local farmer community and cacao stakeholders. I conducted several cacao farmer workshops between 2010 and 2014, translated a book for famers into Bahasa Indonesia (local language) and cooperate with the Tadulako University in Palu (lectures and student courses). Beyond that, I organized interdisciplinary lectures in Germany and give talks at different institutions in Europe and Indonesia to increase the awareness towards biodiversity-friendly landscape management, taking into account ecosystem services and feedback from local communities.
Further voluntary activities (selection):
Monitoring and banding of birds for WWF Austria, IFV Helgoland, BirdLife International and Auring e.V.
Translation work for nature conservation NGO's (e.g., The Orang-Utan Project in Sumatra; Ecotourism Bureau Malia Tours Sulawesi)
Volunteer at 'Lebenshilfe e.V.' (home for the handicapped; Austria)
Volunteer at ABNÖ (Niederösterreichische Berg,- und Naturwacht; training of rescue dogs)
Memberships: BirdLife; OBC (Oriental Bird Club); ATBC (Association for Tropical Biology
and Conservation); gtö (Society for Tropical Ecology); DO-G (Deutsche Ornithologen-Gesellschaft); IEP (International Elephant Project); ProRing e.V.; ÖAV (Österreichischer Alpenverein e.V.) and DAV (Deutscher Alpenverein e.V.); ABA (Austrian Biologist Association)
Last but not least, I like to think outside the box and to discover new challenges.
Besides the science, I am passionate about all mountain activities (hiking, climbing, slacklining),
dog training, journalistic and creative writing, photography, art, culture and creativity
from all over the world!
Let's enjoy and commit ourselves to a wonderful world.
