Theses

Theses related to forest management enhance the scientific basis for silvicultural recommendations. Many of these theses are based on the students’ own field work. They analyze the effects of management actions on different forest attributes (e.g., species composition, forest structure), processes (e.g., growth, mortality, regeneration) and functions (e.g., carbon uptake). Another essential topic of silvicultural theses is the adaptation of forests to climate change and associated increases in disturbances.

In the context of the development and application of ecosystem models at the chair, there are always opportunities for theses. This ranges from more application-oriented questions (i.e., use of simulation models to answer ecological and forestry questions) to topics with a stronger modeling reference (e.g., parameterization and evaluation of new (partial) models).

We offer a wide range of topics such as theses about the effects of forest structures and climate on biodiversity and composition of communities (e.g. by using monitoring data of insects, birds, bats), or about the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (e.g. in the context of decomposition of deadwood or carrion). Further, we supervise theses in the field of wildlife ecology on habitat selection and animal movement using data from e.g. camera trapping and GPS-tracking.

In the field of remote sensing we offer theses working with passive (i.e., Landsat, Sentinel) or active (i.e., Laserscanning) data. We have a set of ready-to-use data sets, but also appreciate students developing their own datasets. Thesis topics either focus on the development of new remote sensing methods or the application of an established method to a new problem/region. Thesis in the field of remote sensing might include field work to gather ground-truth data.