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Students
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Sandro Pütz
(UFZ Leipzig)
Sandro started his Ph.D. thesis in Leipzig in October 2000, and
is working in a collaborative project with the IFEVA- Dep. Ecología,
Facultad de Agronomía (Universidad de Buenos Aires) on "The
impact of landscape heterogeneity on grazing-induced degradation of
Patagonian steppes". He finished his thesis in 2006 and is
now postdoc postoctoral researcher at the OESA and involved in the
Mata Atlantica project on biodiversity conservation in fragmented
landscapes at the Atlantic Plateau of São Paulo (Brazil) (BioCAPSP)
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Stephanie Schadt
(UFZ Leipzig)
Stephanie obtained a Deutschen Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) grant
for her Ph.D. thesis on "Scenarios for a viable lynx population
in Germany using a GIS-based, spatially explicit and
individual-based population model", which started in May 1999.
Stephanie finished her thesis in May 2002 and was postdoc at the
OESA. At the moment she is Marie Curie fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway.
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Pablo Cipriotti
(Uni Buenos Aires, Argentine), co-supervision
Pablo started his Ph.D. thesis in 2000
and finished in 2006. He was the Argentinean
Ph.D. student of the collaborative project with the IFEVA- Dep.
Ecología, Facultad de Agronomía (Universidad de Buenos Aires) on "The
impact of landscape heterogeneity on grazing-induced degradation of
Patagonian steppes".
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Javier Naves
(University Oviedo, Spain), director del thesis
I started to collaborate with Javier in 1994 on modeling the
population dynamics of the endangered brown bear population in the
Cantabrian Mountains because I was looking for an excuse to return
sometimes to the good food, the exciting landscape, and of course to
some Sidrería in Oviedo. However, our joined research project went
that well that Javier asked me to become the director of his Ph.D.
In 1999 he finished his Ph.D. thesis on "The risk of extinction
for the brown bears (Ursus arctos) in the Cordillera
Cantabrica (Spain): the western population". This
work
summarized more than 15 years of his brown bear research in northern
Spain, and 5 years of our ongoing collaboration. Since August 2002
is working in a "Fremd F+E" project on "Analyzing extinction,
habitat loss and fragmentation of brown bears (Ursus arctos)
in northern Spain: recent and historical perspectives".
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Stephan Getzin
(Uni Jena, Germany), co-supervision
Stephan started his
PhD in 2003 and finished in 2007. In his thesis he attempted to
contribute to selected topics in forest ecological research to
better understand essential processes that lead to small- and
large-scale forest structures. His topics were centered on point
pattern analysis of fully mapped forest stands to analyze their
spatial structure and to reveal which processes and factors may
determined the structure of these forest communities. Comparative
analyses were done by comparing chronosequences of stands of
different age and stands with homogeneous and heterogeneous
environmental conditions. He also analyzed asymmetric tree growth at
the stand level by comparing the stem pattern and the crown patterns
and used recent remote sensing techniques to assess competition at
the stand level from field-measured and photo-derived crown extent.
Stephan made in his PhD excessively use
of my software
Programita for doing his point-pattern analyses.
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Adan Abajo
(University Oviedo,
Spain), co-director de thesis
The objective of Adans
PhD is to obtain a better understanding of habitat use and the
extinction dynamics of the Cantabrian Capercaillie (Tetrao
urogallus cantabricus) in the Cantabrian Mountains (in the NW of
Spain) and to assess the viability of the highly endangered (meta)population.
His PhD consists in three steps: (1) development of a model of
habitat suitability, (2) an inverse-pattern-oriented analysis of
individual-based dispersal models to assess connectivity among leks
and to reveal dispersal rules of Capercaillie which agree with the
observed extinction pattern of leks, and (3) a full
spatially-explicit population model to reconstruct the past dynamics and to assess
the viability of the (meta)population. Adan successfully
defended his thesis in April 2007.
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Isabel Martínez
(University Oviedo, Spain), co-supervision
Isa’s
research interests are focused in the study of plant-animal
interactions during plant reproduction, i.e. through fruit
production, seed dispersal, post-dispersal seed predation and
seedling germination and survival. She used the tree community in
secondary temperate forest as study system. In the Cantabrian range,
these forest are mainly composed of fleshy fruited trees (holly
Ilex aquifolium, yew Taxus baccata, and hawthorn
Crataegus monogyna), and dry fruited tree species like beech
Fagus sylvatica and hazel Corylus avellana. Isa
mapped all stems in a plot of an old-growth forest and monitored
seedlings in 1m2 plots distributed over different micro
sites within the plot. She used this data to perform detailed
point-pattern analysis using Programita to describe (1) the
pattern of individual species, the association pattern between pairs
of species, (3) the pattern of seedlings relative to adults, and (4)
the spatio-temporal pattern of seedlings. The aim of these analyses
was to accumulate evidence against or in favor of hypotheses about
mechanisms and processes determining community dynamics and to
derive new hypotheses to be evaluated in the field.
Isa successfully defended
her thesis in July 2007.
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Rajapandian K
(Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun), co-supervision
Raja obtained a DAAD sandwich fellowship to spends one year in
Leipzig to develop habitat models for predicting habitat
occupancy of tiger (Panthera tigris) and its prey species in
the Indian portion of Terai Arc Landscape (TAL) and and to evaluate
landscape connectivity using a spatially-explicit and
individual-based approach. Further objectives are to evaluate
the previously identified corridors in respect to their ability to
connect habitat patches, to assess the interaction between landscape
structure and dispersing individuals among subpopulations, and to
provide conservation and management implications for the long-term
survival of tiger and other wildlife species in this landscape.
Visitors
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
Argentina
South Africa
Spain
Other Countries
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Steve Higgins (University
Frankfurt)
The South African modeler found his way to Germany and
shared office with me. Steve is profesor for physical geography at the
University of Frankfurt.
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Felix Knauer (Uni
Freiburg)
After my good experience with the brown bear project in Spain I was
happy to broaden my brown bear research with scientist from a research
station in the German Alps, only five minutes away from one of the castles
of Bavarians mad Kings Ludwig in Linderhof. Although another excuse to
escape to nicer areas, the joined research with Felix on the extension of
brown bears into the eastern Alps went so well that it became the nucleus
for my habilitation thesis which I finished in 1999 at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Munich. After 5 years work in the Slovenian bear telemetry project (Project
Medved) for his Ph.D thesis, Felix left the Alps in 2001 and moved to the
Netherlands but returned 2004 to Germany.
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