Scientific interests                                               

My research lies the interface between landscape structure and biodiversity. Thereby, I focus on the impact of 'space' and 'time' on biodiversity in agricultural landscapes:

Spatial features affect species diversity beyond local patch factors (as habitat quality, management and abiotic conditions). Using analyses of landscape characteristics I try to understand how ecological pattern and their underlying processes connect to space, focusing on GIS-supported tools for the selection of study sites and for the detection of landscape gradients in complex landscapes. Because of the incoming interest in spatial ecology during the past decade the population dynamic and other biological consequences of dispersal, at the level of local populations and entire metapopulations, have received much attention in both theoretical and applied ecology. Together with the modellers of the University Jena, I investigate species richness in agricultural landscapes under land-use change, where we develop MOBILE, a spatially explicit, multi-species metapopulation model.

‚The times, they are a changing': land-use dynamics create complex spatio-temporal pattern of habitats of different age in marginal landscapes, but little is known about the consequences of these processes on the factors governing biodiversity at the landscape level. Consequently, I focus on species richness and composition of carabid communities in a chronosere of differently aged grassland sites.