Research Interests
Research Interests
I am interested in landscape ecology, biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and conservation biology. My main research focuses on the effects of landscape spatial structure on species diversity patterns in agroecosystems using both controlled and natural experiments. Research questions deal with, for example, effects of plant species diversity on spiders in artificial plant communities, habitat preferences of a rare bumblebee species, influence of landscape characteristics on movement patterns of animals, or effects of landscape structure and land use intensity on biodiversity. Furthermore, I am studying the effects of landscape structure and land-use intensity on species interactions and the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning. Another focus is the evaluation of how conservation measures or alterations in the common agricultural policy (GAP) affect biodiversity and the associated ecosystem services. My studies encompass a variety of functional groups and take place across multiple spatial scales. In my research, I apply various faunistic surveying techniques, classical capture-mark-recapture methods as well as molecular approaches. Lately, I started to address the effects of landscape structure on species interactions and the relevance of biodiversity to ecosystem functioning.