Current Projectshttps://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/f08/departments/tsz/animal-ecology/research/current-projectshttps://www.uni-giessen.de/@@site-logo/logo.png
Reversing the trend of biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes is key to supporting sustainable food production. By working collectively with farmers across three model regions in Germany, this project aims to take a landscape-level approach to enhancing agricultural biodiversity, and to develop agricultural and policy instruments at the German and EU level.
Producing scientific information in a format that is accessible to humans and computers (i.e., machine-actionable scientific information) can help us organize, interpret, and compare scientific findings more efficiently. This project will prototype a method for producing machine-actionable ecological information from the outset of publication.
Increasing agricultural biodiversity is expected to strengthen the resilience of farms to disturbances caused by agricultural practices and climate change, but few studies have actually measured how resilient these ecosystems, and the services they provide, are to disturbance. Using biological control as a model ecosystem service, this project aims to improve our understanding of how agrobiodiversity at local to landscape scales contributes to the resilience of biological pest control, and how we can enhance this service in different landscapes and climatic conditions.
Low-diversity, intensive agricultural practices can harm bees and other pollinating insects. This project aims to develop and test a cost effective strategy of re-introducing biodiversity into agricultural landscapes by alternating strips of non-cultivated vegetation with strips of agricultural crops to enhance food and habitat for insect pollinators.
Insect endosymbionts—organisms that live inside insects—can significantly impact insect biology by conferring protection against natural enemies, which has important consequences for sustainable pest management strategies. This project seeks to characterize the intra-specific variation of endosymbiotic relationships in the cabbage stem flea beetle, an important agricultural pest,and whether these relationships vary across landscapes.
Push-pull technology has been successfully implemented in cereal cropping systems in sub-Saharan Africa to reduce insect pests, and increase food security and resilience to climate change. The EU-funded UPSCALE project seeks to expand the use of push-pull systems beyond cereal crops and increase their adoption at the farm, landscape, and regional scale.
Despite a large body of research indicating the potential for natural enemies to provide pest control services in agricultural landscapes, two decades of research has yet to produce a definitive answer for how landscape composition influences pest dynamics. This project will create an open-source, standardized data platform to analyze and predict pest control across landscapes to support the development of decision-support tools for land managers and growers.
Birds may either support or impede pest control by feeding on arthropod pests or natural enemies, respectively. This project will elucidate the impact of birds on agricultural crop yields by evaluating multi-trophic interactions between plants, pests, natural enemies, and birds, and how these interactions are mediated by plant volatiles.
This project is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and will investigate the relationship between landscape composition, intraspecific diversity in agricultural insect pests, and multi-trophic interactions between insect pests, endosymbionts, and natural enemies.
Using large empirical databases, functional “archetypes” of crop-pest-enemy systems, and ecological modeling, this project will generate the first model-driven, open access global map to evaluate the potential for pest control services.
Soil invertebrates provide a number of critical services such as cycling nutrients and maintaining soil structure. The goal of this project is to understand the impact of management disturbances, such as livestock grazing, on the structure and function of soil invertebrate communities.
