Full house at Marie Pratzer's PHD defense!! She talked about "Conservation in contested landscapes: considering land-use complexity in tropical dry woodlands" - congrats on an amazing dissertation!!
#phd #defense #dissertation #congrats #biogeography #huberlin
Mapping diverse livestock systems across South America’s dry diagonal - new paper out in Global Environmental Change, led by Jamie Burton @biogeoberlin.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @humboldtuni.bsky.social #SystemShift
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
🏛️📢 Failed land investments are a wake-up call for governments to:
• Reevaluate priorities in land governance.
• Enhance government enforcement capabilities.
• Prioritize and amplify local voices.
ecologyandsociety.org/vol31/iss2/a...
3️⃣ Most of the projects targeted areas used by local, forest-dependent communities. Despite failure, some of these communities’ lost access to lands in the process, indicating that even failed projects can result in land grabs. 👤🌳
This resulted in 3 main findings: 1️⃣ Projects failed largely because they faced resistance from local communities, highlighting major misalignments. 2️⃣ Deforestation was often a step toward production, but surprisingly, a large part of these cases included illegal timber harvesting. 🌳🚫
Millions of hectares of tropical woodlands are being cleared for agricultural projects that are not productive. Their study reviews land investments that failed and led to deforestation to understand why they failed, how they deforested and how this process changed access by local communities...
Happy to announce @anabuchadas.bsky.social last phd chapter is out! Together with an amazing team, @tkuemmerle.bsky.social, @matthiasbaumann.bsky.social, @profjulietlu.bsky.social, @arnimscheidel.bsky.social & many more - read the paper here: ecologyandsociety.org/vol31/iss2/a...
Pedro @pedrofernandez91.bsky.social & Seba @aguiarse86.bsky.social worked on mapping the Argentine beef supply chain with Patrick Meyfroidt & Erasmus zu Ermgassen and they gave a seminar on livestock systems in the #Chaco & #SouthAmerica.
A great, strengthening collaboration!
@values4eu.bsky.social
Großflächige Brände im südamerikanischen Chaco, eine der größten Trockenwaldregionen der Welt, die sich über die Länder Argentinien, Bolivien und Paraguay erstreckt. Das Foto wurde im September 2011 im argentinischen Chaco aufgenommen. Foto: Julieta Decarre / HU Berlin
🌱🔥 Eine Studie der #HumboldtUni zeigt: Die meisten Waldbrände im #Chaco entstehen durch Rodungen für Soja & Rinderzucht, nicht nur durch Dürre. Mit besserem Feuermanagement & der #EUDR lassen sich Feuer und Schäden eindämmen. Mehr 👉 www.hu-berlin.de/nachrichten/...
📢 Happy to announce my last PhD chapter is out! With an amazing team: @tkuemmerle.bsky.social, @matthiasbaumann.bsky.social, @profjulietlu.bsky.social, Patrick Meyfroidt, and others @biogeoberlin.bsky.social, we investigate failed land investments that led to deforestation 📄: sl1nk.com/odvipum
Super-important study!
Higher carbon storage in primary than secondary boreal forests in Sweden | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Very nice research highlight by Jérémy Froidevaux & Laura Touzot on our recent European bison habitat use paper 👉 "High habitat‐use plasticity in European bison (Bison bonasus) across spatial scales and seasons" besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
"Altogether, Retez et al. (2025) provide the most comprehensive evidence to date that European bison exhibit highly flexible, context-dependent habitat use and can be considered as a generalist species, supporting neither the view that they are forest nor open-land specialists."
Couldn't' agree more with this: "By shifting the focus from ‘where bison belong’ to ‘how bison adapt’, the study provides a conceptual foundation for designing restoration strategies that are both ecologically effective and socially viable."
👉 link to the original study: doi.org/10.1111/1365...
Why this matters: #Rangers face violence, isolation, and extreme stress.
Supporting ranger #wellbeing is not only an ethical responsibility it is essential for effective biodiversity conservation and sustainable protected area management.
#mentalhealth #newpaper
doi.org/10.1111/con4...
Our study highlights the psychological pressures facing conservation rangers globally and proposes four priority actions:
1. Routine mental health monitoring
2. Formal recognition of rangers as essential workers
3. Sustainable financing
4. Institutional wellbeing support
Protecting nature shouldn’t cost rangers their mental health. Our new study highlights the urgent need for mental health support for them worldwide.
New paper by Mahmood Soofi & colleges out now in Conservation Letters!
@tkuemmerle.bsky.social
@arashghoddousi.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1111/con4...
Very excited to have Oleksandra Shumilova on our team! She is an ecosystem ecologist whose research is related to human-nature interactions & sustainable development and works as a postdoc at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries Berlin.
#newmember #welcome
Even though it has been some time since the talk, we did not want to withhold any insights!!
At the #ECTE2026, European Conference of Tropical Ecology 2026, @soctropecol.bsky.social, @alfredoromero.bsky.social held an amazing talk as a keynote speaker and enjoyed the event very much!
Excuse the late answer: the paper will be open access in about 6 months. If you are interested, we can share the paper via DM already before that :)
Just write us a message!
Our study highlights the importance of protecting large-continuous patches of forests within a biodiversity-friendly agricultural matrix, in which silvopastures play a major role.
#chaco #conservation #biogeograhpy #research #forest #paper #new
check it out:
tinyurl.com/2nh7kjkj
We use forest structure indicators in a Bayesian framework to understand the impacts of deforestation beyond its area. We did this for the Chaco: we found stunning edge effects of >700m with reductions of up to 41% in our structure indicators & 92.3 million tons of so far unquantified AGB losses.
Photo credits: Asunción Semper Pascual
Edge effects from deforestation in the Chaco!
-> New paper out in @globalchangebio.bsky.social with Seba Torrella
& @matthiasbaumann.bsky.social Marie Pratzer @aguiarse86.bsky.social @mariapiquerr.bsky.social Ruben Ginzburg Gregorio Gavier Pizarro @tkuemmerle.bsky.social
tinyurl.com/2nh7kjkj
Last week, @tkuemmerle.bsky.social, @camillabrunet.bsky.social and @francescobini.bsky.social went to the Natural History Museum of Berlin with our biogeography seminar students to check out their amazing collection!
#naturkundemuseum #excursion #seminar #teaching #huberlin
Last week we bid farewell to Prof. Dr. Bernhard Nitz, an institution of our department! In his colloquium he talked about his 70 years at HU, highlighting changes of the Geography Department from 1945 to 1990. We want to thank him for his important research and for being an incredible inspiration!
Because agribusinesses mainly expand onto land already used by smallholders, securing smallholders’ land rights can both support livelihoods and protect forests and biodiversity.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Using data from nearly 1 million km² across two major deforestation hotspots, we show that forests are lost more slowly where forest-dwelling smallholders are present – even as agriculture expands.
Tropical deforestation is one of the greatest challenges for global sustainability. Diverse actors (smallholders, Indigenous communities, agribusinesses) make decisions that determine whether forests persist or disappear. How interactions & competition among actors influence the forests is unclear.
Commodity frontiers expand more slowly into tropical forests where forest smallholders are present – new paper out in PNAS led by Marie Pratzer
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
@tkuemmerle.bsky.social
@humboldtuni.bsky.social
@pnas.org
Agriculture-driven edge effects in a deforestation hotspot
👉new paper in Global Change Biology, led by Sebastian Torella
doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70737
@biogeoberlin.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu #SystemShift