Michael Strohbach PhD » Team

Michael is a landscape ecologist with an urban focus.

He has expertise in green infrastructure, ecosystem services and urban biodiversity and cultural landscapes. He teaches multivariate-, and geostatistics as well as biodiversity data management at Braunschweig University. Even so, his commitment to PAN Works is not strictly quantitative. He is fascinated by how humans have shaped landscapes, ecosystems and communities in the past, what lessons we can learn from these experiences, and what role humans ought to play in nature.

After high school, Michael worked as an environmental educator in the Eichsfeld-Hainich-Werratal nature park as part of his civil service and went on to study Geoecology (Ecosystem-Ecology) in Bayreuth, Germany. After graduation, he was an environmental consultant for a small firm in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was frequently confronted the environmental impacts of urban expansion. Based on this experience, he decided to pursue a doctoral degree in landscape ecology from Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research and the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. There he worked on biodiversity, green infrastructure and ecosystem services in the urban region of Leipzig and Halle. During postdoctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, USA, the Thünen Institute of Biodiversity in Braunschweig, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and finally the Technische Universität Braunschweig, he has continued to work on biodiversity, ecosystem services and sustainability in rural-urban regions in Europe and the USA. In addition, he gained experience in biodiversity conservation in traditional agricultural systems, human-wildlife interactions and movement ecology.

His current projects include urban climate adaptation, spatial behavior of coyotes (in a collaboration with the Narragansett Bay Coyote Study), urban domestic cats, and conservation grazing with water buffalos.