Early studies concerned the community of soil-dwelling dipteran larvae in the Göttingen beech forest.
This work included a large field experiment, which manipulated the input of canopy and herb litter.

I have also studied communities of Diptera associated with dead beech wood in the course of a ten-year succession.

I am interested in the determinants of diversity and studied dipteran communities of other types of forest and open habitats.

Spider communities of these habitats were investigated too in order to find out whether diversity of spider communities varied in parallel with the diversity of Diptera.

Insect-plant relationships form another item on my research agenda. My model system is the Allium ursinum food web with
Allium ursinum - Cheilosia fasciata - Phygadeuon ursini
as its core food chain.

Research strategy
While I appreciate that it is often neccessary to conduct exploratory studies, I try to design my studies in a way allowing for a priori predictions to be formulated thereby taking advantage of the possibility to use one-sided statistical tests.

You can find more details on my areas of research by clicking the respective (white) links in the green box.