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.
News
From September 7th to 8th, Johan Bärwald attended the 27th BIOECON Conference at St. John’s College in Cambridge. There, he gave a presentation titled “Hunting for Biodiverse and Climate-Adapted Forests – A Discrete Choice Experiment among Hunters in Northeastern Germany.”
The article "Should We Put Solar Panels in Rural Landscapes? Discrete Choice Modeling Reveals Preferences for Local Biodiversity and Community Benefits", written by Charlotte Gerling and Frank Wätzold, is now published in the journal Natural Resource Modeling.
Our team participated in the company running event on the 3rd of September. We were impressed by the 5 finishers, especially Qais Daraghmeh (first from the right), who just joined our working group and had only arrived in Cottbus a day earlier.
The paper "Cost-effectiveness of centralized versus decentralized decision-making in agri-environment schemes for biodiversity conservation: Insights from an ecological-economic model" co-authored by Caterina De Petris, Martin Drechsler and Frank Wätzold, is now available in the journal Ecological Economics.
We congratulate Somaiyeh Nezhadkheirollah on the successful defense of her dissertation, with the title: "Ecological-Economic Modelling of Biological Pest Control".
Simeon Onya participated in the 7th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economics (WCERE 2026), held in Carcavelos, Lisbon, Portugal. At the congress, he presented his research: “Grey or Green Solutions? Household Preferences for Coastal Protection Measures: Evidence from Developing Country Context”.
Frank Wätzold presented a paper on "Using Passive Acoustic Monitoring to Develop State-based Agri-environment Schemes to Conserve Meadow Birds" at the European Congress of Conservation Biology in Leiden, the Netherlands in July 2026.
Last Friday, our team went on our annual company outing. This year, we went on a short bike ride from the train station to the Kutzeburg Mill, followed by a picnic at Madlower Lake.