iModules

In this course, students will learn a range of meta-study techniques and methods essential for synthesizing results from multiple individual studies. The curriculum covers framing research questions, conducting systematic literature searches, applying methods for meta-analysis, and effectively presenting results.

This course examines how biodiversity is changing in the Anthropocene and the consequences for ecosystem functioning and stability. Students explore what aspects of biodiversity are monitored, emerging global trends, and how major drivers—land and sea use, exploitation, invasive species, and climate change—shape these patterns. Key tools such as the IUCN Red List and biodiversity monitoring schemes at global, European, and national scales are introduced. Lectures provide an overview of biodiversity change and current strategies to bend the curve of biodiversity loss. Practical exercises focus on modeling biodiversity trends and analyzing time-series data to interpret and predict biodiversity dynamics.

This course introduces the ecology of animal movement and its relevance to biodiversity and conservation. Students examine key movement types—such as foraging, dispersal, and migration—and explore their ecological drivers, patterns, and consequences. The course covers major tracking methods and how movement data inform ecological models. It also investigates how global change factors, including climate shifts, light pollution, and habitat fragmentation, alter movement and disrupt ecosystems. Finally, students learn to apply movement data to conservation planning, with a focus on connectivity analysis. Lectures, case studies, and practical exercises build skills for analyzing movement in real-world contexts.

Ecosystem restoration and rewilding are crucial strategies for protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services. This course explores the science and practice of rewilding. It presents different approaches to ecosystem restoration, building on the ecological theory of complex ecosystems and on process-oriented approaches to biodiversity restoration. The course explores rewilding science from the lenses of environmental, economic, and societal values, and it deepens on nature-based solutions to environmental problems such as ecosystem degradation and climate change. The course will also include an excursion to a rewilding region and lectures from practitioners.

The module introduces the economic foundations for the use of biodiversity and natural commons as well as the ecological processes in structured population models and ecological networks (demography, competition for resources, population dynamics, trophic relationships). Lectures give an overview over different approaches to parameterizing, validating, analyzing, and documenting ecological-economic models of varying complexity, as well as on the optimization of the management. In the exercises, students develop and analyze simple ecological-economic models or apply more complex ones to explore the optimal management of biodiversity and natural commons.