Biotic Responses to Environmental Change

We are interested in understanding and predicting the responses of individuals, populations and communities to environmental change. Many of our questions are related to interactions among species, how they are affected by environmental context, and how they, in turn, affect the stability of higher and lower levels of ecological organization. Other questions deal with how individual-level traits such as dispersal and body size of organisms change across environmental gradients and how this affects the stability of communities.

To address these questions, we rely on experiments with model organisms such as aquatic microbes but also field studies with insects, as well as statistical and mathematical modelling.

Head of group: Dr. Frank Pennekamp

Research themes

• Body size responses to warming
• Dispersal and movement ecology in fragmented landscapes
• Ecological stability in a changing world