Since I started to study Biology at the University of Ulm, I am very interested in human-wildlife conflicts as well as in the big challenges of today – such as the sustainable production of food to feed a growing world population.

Fortunately for me, I had the opportunity to start my Diploma thesis at the Institute for Experimental Ecology at the University of Ulm. Even more important: here, I met very inspiring and supporting researchers, such as Elisabeth Kalko, Kirsten Jung, Marco Tschapka and many more.

Here, I also met the bats and was fascinated by these animals ever since. Thus, as an ecologist, my focus lies on bat ecology in anthropogenic landscapes. So far, I have studied bats in grassland systems and in intensively managed farmland in Germany, as well as in semi-natural and anthropogenic landscapes of Japan. I hold extensive scientific expertise in acoustic identification of European bat species based on their echolocation calls. Besides the application of this skill, I am also searching for new ways to improve the automatic identification of bat species from echolocation calls. During my Diploma thesis and Dissertation, I also acquired expertise in landscape analyses using the Geographic Information System (GIS) and complex statistical analyses using the statistical platform R. During my Postdoc fellowship in Japan, I also learned to use GPS-telemetry to investigate the movement behavior of bats. Besides bats, I am also interested in their prey. I studied nocturnal insects above differently managed arable fields and I am uncovering the diet of different bat species using Next Generation Sequencing.

My scientific aim for the near future is to use my experience and expertise to investigate how wildlife responds to effects of climate change, such as drought, in open as well as in forested habitats.