For a list of publications, see my CV. For current and former projects, see Projects.

My research focuses on the trade-offs that arise in the context of a transformation towards an environmentally sustainable management of agricultural landscapes in Germany and Europe. I am interested in understanding how the decision making of individual agents and groups responds to policy interventions and how this translates into landscape-level provision of multiple environmental objectives: ecosystem services as well as above-ground and below-ground biodiversity.

I am convinced that societally relevant sustainability research requires a thorough understanding of the studied social–ecological systems. To achieve this, I collaborate across disciplines – with agricultural scientists, landscape and soil ecologists, soil physicists, psychologists, geographers, legal scholars and ultimately, with stakeholders. Navigating these different perspectives is probably one of my major strengths as researcher.

Methodologically, I draw upon a broad toolbox of methods including quantitative and qualitative methods. Agent-based modelling is the core element of that toolbox, which also includes surveys (especially discrete choice experiments and deliberative monetary valuation), interviews, interdisciplinary evidence synthesis as well as conceptual work.

In the following, I provide a brief overview about my main research foci:

• Agri-environmental policy & governance: Ultimately, virtually all of the other topics addressed by my work lead to this one: the attempt to evaluate existing and possibly suggest new options for agri-environmental policy. I address this topic both from a conceptual perspective and by applying agent-based modelling to study the effects of different policy scenarios. In the context of agent-based modelling, I am particularly interested in a behaviourally rich representation of a broad set of interacting farm decisions that are relevant for multifunctionality, and in the coupling of socio-economic and ecological models to simulate the ecological effects of these decisions.
• Farmers’ behaviour: To properly understand and model the effectiveness of policy options, one needs a comprehensive understanding of land-users‘ (e.g. farmers‘) decision making. I am particularly interested in rich and theory-based representations of human behaviour in agent-based models, e.g. by drawing upon theories from social psychology. This also requires empirical investigations into farmers‘ behaviour with a broad range of methodological approaches (from qualitative interviews to discrete choice experiments).
• Nonmarket valuation: Economic nonmarket valuation has been a major topic for me during my PhD thesis. While not central anymore, it still has much importance in my work. It has mainly focused on deliberative monetary valuation and discrete choice experiments applied to estimate public preferences of ecosystem services and biodiversity across different projects (e.g. AgriScape, BIOcean5D, ECO-N).
• Other topics: In addition to the three main foci mentioned above, I have ventured into other topics and fields from time to time, mostly in collaboration with colleagues and often with a rather conceptual perspective or in large, interdisciplinary teams. These ventures have so far included, among other things, the governance of genome editing, the relationship between degrowth and liberal democracy or the relevance of the social-ecological systems perspective for the analysis of wind erosion.

P.S. I am a firm believer in the principles of open science. Most of my publications are published open access; for the few paywalled exceptions, I provide accepted version PDFs where publisher policy allows. For all inaccessible publications, feel free to contact me. Wherever possible, I share code and data, usually on GitHub.