Research

The Animal Ecology Working Group conducts research on the ecology of sustainable land use and how to maintain biodiverse, functional, and resilient ecosystems in the face of global disturbance and change. With a focus on arthropod biodiversity and arthropod-plant interactions, our working group studies the connections between land use intensity and landscape context, and the conservation and resilience of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services, such as natural pest control and pollination. 

Our priority is to combine ecological sustainability with agricultural food production to create systems that are resilient to abiotic and biotic changes. We explore ways to achieve sustainable social-ecological transitions in natural and human-modified systems at field-, landscape-, and regional-scales using multi-scale field experiments, greenhouse and laboratory experiments, (social-)ecological modeling, participative and transdisciplinary approaches, and synthesis of large environmental datasets.