Research and teaching at the Chair focus on the application of economic knowledge to problems of environmental and resource management, in particular the preservation of ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation. Methods and approaches include, among others, ecological-economic modelling, the development of decision support software, as well as stakeholder interviews and choice experiments.

Dear Students, if you are interested in writing a Bachelor- or Masterthesis at our chair, you can now find a list of possible thesis topics at our homepage. You are also invited to discuss a topic of your choice with us. In case of further interest, please contact us during consultation hours.

The next consultation hour Prof. Wätzold: Tuesday, 12.9.23, 1 - 2 pm (only in presence in LG 10/532). It is not necessary to register with Regina Kirsche.

• Publication: Schöttker, O., Hütt, C., Jauker F., Witt, J., Bareth, G., and Wätzold, F. (2023): "Monitoring costs of result-based payments for biodiversity conservation: Will UAV-assisted remote sensing be the game-changer?". Journal for Nature Conservation (2023). (Link)
• Conference: "SMILe - Grazing improvement with a software-based, multi-level information system for farmers" by Oliver Schöttker at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Ecology in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, in Leipzig, 15.09.2023.
• Poster presentations: "Environmental federalism and agri-environment schemes: is there more to centralization than uniform policies?" by Caterina de Petris at the ECEM 2023 - European Conference on Ecological Modelling, Leipzig (06.09.2023) (Link)
• Frank Wätzold and Martin Drechsler organised a workshop on a comparison of "Social-ecological and ecological-economic models for land-use based biodiversity conservation" at the European Conference of Ecological Modelling in Leipzig which took place from the 4th till the 8th September in Leipzig
• Conference: XXIV annual BIOECON conference in Santiago de Compostela (Spain), 31st August - 1st September 2023
  • "Pay for effort or pay for effect? Cost-effectiveness of action-based and result-based conservation payments with several conservation options", Charlotte Gerling
  • "Environmental federalism, agri-environment schemes and multiple species conservation: is there more to centralization than uniform policies?", Caterina De Petris
  • "Institutional setting, payment vehicle and incentive-compatibility of stated preference surveys in developing countries: a choice experiment on conserving a biodiversity hotspot in South Africa.", Henrique Manhique
• Publication: Markova-Nenova, N., Engler, J. O., Cord, A. F., Wätzold, F. (2023): Will passive acoustic monitoring make result-based payments more attractive? A cost comparison with human observation for farmland bird monitoring. Conservation Science and Practice. e13003. (Link)
• Publication: Hao, Z, Wätzold, F., Sturm, A (2023): A spatially explicit hydro-economic modelling procedure to design cost-effective agri-environment schemes for mitigating water pollution from cropland. Water Economics and Policy. (Link)
• Publication: C. Gerling, O. Schöttker, J. Hearne (2023): The multi-period reserve design problem under climate change. Sustainability Analytics and Modeling 2023(3), 100025. (Link)

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