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
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.
On 2 June 2026, Astrid Sturm, Kara Kadir, and Tasin Siraj from BTU took part in the GreenGrass consortium meeting at the Living Lab Relliehausen, including a presentation of Horizont's new collar and an excursion to the Solling-Vogler Nature Park.
A new paper by Ahmed Shaqfa, Amani Al-Assaf, Charlotte Gerling, and Frank Wätzold has been published in in Rangeland Ecology and Management! It is titled: “Cost-Benefit Analysis of Contour Ridges as Rainwater Harvesting Technique for Climate Change Adaptation in Rangelands” and can be found here.
Frank Wätzold and Anna Cord are guest editors of the special issue for Biological Conservation titled “Harnessing technological developments in biodiversity monitoring and agricultural production to rethink agri-environment schemes for conservation.” You can access it here.
Johan Bärwald returned from his research saty at the Department of Food and Ressource Economics at the University of Copenhagen. During his two month stay he was analyzing hunter preferences using a choice experiment to optimize hunting and foret management.
An article co-authored by Cosima van Mierlo has been published in the journal Earth System Governance. The article is titled “Integrating political economy and financial markets in qualitative scenario analysis to elicit EU decarbonization pathways” and is available online here.
Caterina De Petris has a new paper available with the title:"Farmers’ spatial targeting, landscape elements, and the cost-effectiveness of result-based versus measure-based payments: Insights from an ecological-economic model". It is published in Resource and Energy Economics.