Chair of Botany, Vegetation Science and Mountain Ecosystems
Botany and vegetation science provide elementary foundations for agriculture, forestry and nature conservation. In addition to imparting relevant skills to future practitioners, we advise decision-makers and conduct applied research.
Since 2001, research has focused on mountain forest ecosystems, biodiversity informatics and conservation biology. Teaching covers the biological principles of forest engineering (general and special forest botany, knowledge of woody plants, knowledge of indicator plants and forest habitats) and botanical aspects of forest nature conservation (peatland restoration; biotope mapping). In addition, the professorship teaches cross-sectoral competence for solving land use and nature conservation conflicts in high mountain areas within its own Master's degree.
The starting point of our research is the recording of species, habitats and growth conditions with the aim of understanding the plant cover as a result of location and human use. We use this systems knowledge for bioindication and spatial modelling of environmental factors, species and habitats. In cooperation with practitioners and planners, we develop tools for forest management, nature conservation, risk assessment and prioritisation of ecosystem functions.
We are the counterpart for applied research and development in the fields of forestry, nature conservation and natural hazard management. In addition to bachelor's and master's theses, we attract third-party funding from the EU, the federal government and Bavarian ministries and forestry companies to qualify PhD students.
We have computer capacity, software and expertise in vegetation databases, geographical information systems and multivariate statistics. A greenhouse, a vegetation hall with outdoor climate and automatic irrigation as well as a laboratory allow us to conduct plant ecological experiments.
Director
Research topics
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Vegetation Ecology
Vegetation ecology is the study of plant community ecology: I am particularly interested in how species and plant communities react to site gradients, but also in how populations of different species influence each other.
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Silviculture
In Silviculture, ecological knowledge is applied to the explanation, prediction and mapping of environmental conditions important for forest trees. Methods include climatology, soil science and biodindication by indicator plants and by leaf and needle levels.
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Biodiversity Informatics
Biodiversity Informatics deals with the storage, processing and transfer of information about animal and plant species at the level of whole organisms (in contrast to molecular Bioinformatics). I am particularly interested in the construction, operation and evaluation of databases in which the geographical distribution, biological attributes and socialisation of Central European plant species are stored.