Hosted by Karin Frank, Aletta Bonn, Marten Winter, Christian Kuhlicke, Henrique Pereira

Governing biodiversity across space:  Discovering principles of sustainability and equity for telecoupled social environmental systems

Socio-ecological systems are connected across space via telecouplings, such that social and ecological processes in one place affect biodiversity and human society in other parts of the globe. While we now have the scientific tools to recognize and quantify these connections, there is a critical need to create (and strengthen existing) governance systems that link ecological and societal outcomes in one location with management in other locations. Further, recent evidence suggests that over the long-term, ecologically-sustainable governance systems are also societally-equitable. My proposed sabbatical research at iDiv addresses this critical need through two specific aims:

AIM 1: Identify principles for equity and sustainability in the telecoupled governance of migratory species, by expanding my current research from North America with European case studies.

AIM 2: Identify generalizable principles for the design of sustainable and equitable telecoupled governance systems through synthesis of research findings with iDiv colleagues.

Hosted by Martin Quaas, Nadja Rüger, Christian Wirth, Andreas Huth and Andreas Sickert

Economics and optimal management strategies for biodiverse forests

Increasingly, forest managers, society, and policy makers pay attention to the multifunctionality of forests. The supply of multiple forest services to society depends on management choices and trade-offs between wood, carbon storage and biodiversity conservation and call for multidisciplinary system perspective and optimized forest management strategies. The sabbatical project builds on my extensive work in rigorous economic optimization of forestry and with its strong economic-ecological basis, multidisciplinarity and newest advance in solving complex large-scale optimization problems by machine learning methods it will contribute to iDiv research in this important field. In turn, I will greatly benefit from collaboration with iDiv’s experts in forest modeling, ecosystem multifunctionality, ecosystem services and -valuation, forestry, and biodiversity economics. The project will contribute to the ongoing public debate on forest policy-making in Germany and Europe. iDiv lectures will cover integrated economic-ecological modeling and applications to multifunctional forestry.

Hosted by Tiffany Knight

Ecological networks along altitudinal gradients in the Páramos in Venezuela

The plant reproductive ecology and plant-animal interactions are considered variables very sensitive to be affected by climatic changes. The plant-pollinator networks in Tropical Mountain from Venezuela could be very sensitive to the loss of component species because of their low nestedness, high levels of specialisation, endemism and functional complementarity. However, there are still large information gaps that need to be explored, for example, what processes are related to the network structures of these environments? The aims of my sabbatical stay are: i) to design an additional sampling of variables for plants and pollinators, for the phenology and pollination monitoring protocol of the GLORIA-Andes summits. ii) To apply these new measurements in the re-monitoring that must be carried out in the year 2023. iii) Analyze the available data on pollinators in elevational gradients on a global scale and analyze their structural patterns, with Prof Knight's team.

Hosted by Tiffany Knight

Meta-networks of species diversity and community pollination in the Andes of Colombia

The sabbatical is a very valuable opportunity to train myself in statistical analysis on several aspects of my own data of pollination networks in Andean forest. I expect to share with Prof Tiffany Knight and her team during the stay, to discuss about the optimal method to analyze the data and about the interpretation of results. The main goal of the research is to evaluate to what extent local networks in an Andean forest present a metanetwork structure and identify the combination of functional traits of the plant and insect species participating in central interactions (forming the metanetwork core). The expected products of sabbatical are 1) writing a journal article with the working group of Prof Knight about pollination metanetwoks in Andean forest and 2) processing an inter-institutional agreement to facilitate access to research fund calls and mobility of researchers and students among both institutions.

Hosted by Sonja Knapp, Marten Winter, Christine Fürst, Carsten Meyer, Aletta Bonn

The Role of Historical and Contemporary Socioeconomic, Racial, and Cultural Segregation in Structuring the Spatial Distribution of Nature and Biodiversity in Cities

The proposed sabbatical project will address how the social geography of cities, as shaped by historical and contemporary dynamics of culture, race, ethnicity, socioeconomics, and migration, influences the biogeography of nature and biodiversity in cities. This research will advance understanding of urban socio-ecological systems by more deeply integrating social and cultural processes into a global comparative analysis of cities. The project will develop new collaborations with a number of iDiv researchers, produce coauthored articles, and a book for a broader public. More broadly, the sabbatical will help me learn from the expertise and experience of my hosts and other iDiv scholars to both broaden and deepen the scope of my research and the book now in development. In addition to immersing in the scholarly discourse at iDiv, I will offer lectures, courses/workshops, co-organize conference sessions, and develop a Study Abroad course for North Carolina State University and iDiv students.