Benjamin Wildermuth

I knew global remote-sensing products—especially forest maps—could differ, but I didn’t realize just how much. 🌍🌲🛰️

When comparing 10 different global forest cover datasets, they overlapped in only 26% of the area. 🤯 doi.org/10.1016/j.on...

-> Choose your forest map wisely I say!

PhD candidate (m/f/x): Connectivity of Urban Areas for Wildlife

Job advertisement: PhD candidate "Connectivity of Urban Areas for Wildlife" - apply now!

We are looking for a PhD candidate in the field of urban habitat connectivity and biodiversity. Further information can be found here: jobs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/jobposting/a...

Apply before March 15th.

Cool selection of understudied taxa!

New paper out using trend data on occupancy and Species Climate Indicators. We show that species of wet and cold areas of the UK are doing badly across lots of different invetebrate groups not just the big, colourful ones.🕷️🐜🪰🪲
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
With @jennistockan.bsky.social

Fig. 1. The relationship between mean shoot length per grass species to species richness of the endophytic insects found in these shoots. A The number of herbivore species, B the sum of herbivore and parasitoid species. The five points indicating no species at all indicate that no one insect species has been reared from the five annual grass species studied, despite intensive shoot sampling (see Table 1). The inquilines of P. australis are included (see Table 2, see also Fig. S2A and S2B for regressions without inquilines). Regression lines were fitted to the species richness found in the ten perennial grass species.

Fig. 2. Images illustrating the insect community of the shoot-inhabiting gall midge Giraudiella inclusa on Common Reed Phragmites australis. A Phragmites australis reedbelt with the ricegrain-like galls of Giraudiella inclusa inside internodes. B The gall midge Giraudiella inclusa: Oviposition, C Early Giraudiella gall development, D late Giraudiella gall development, E the Giraudiella parasitoid Torymus arundinis ovipositing, F the gregarious Giraudiella parasitoid Aprostocetus calamarius, G T. arundinis eggs on a dead 2nd instar host larva, H the conspicuously hairy, solitary T. arundinis larva, I midge skin filled with pupae of the gregarious Platygaster szelenii, J the solitary parasitoid Platygaster cf. quadrifarius (Tscharntke et al. 1991).

🌾🐛 New #BAAE article: Hidden insect food webs thrive inside perennial grass shoots 🌿

Longer shoots host richer herbivore–parasitoid communities. Unmown refuges are key to protecting these overlooked specialists. 🕷️

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.baae.2026.01.004
@gfoesoc.bsky.social

Recovering European River Invertebrate Communities Homogenize or Differentiate Depending on Anthropogenic Stress

🔗 buff.ly/f8RtOzG

New paper on global change impacts on insects, out in GEB🦋🌍

Climate change and urbanisation act synergistically: butterfly declines are stronger under warming in urban environments.

Species traits help explain heterogeneous responses.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

@ylndmc.bsky.social

🚀 iDiv and @uni-jena.de are hiring! Join the Ecological Networks Lab as an IT Specialist (full-time, permanent). Work on lab automation, software dev, and cutting-edge research! 🌿💻

🗓️ Apply by 27 Mar 2026
📍 Leipzig (Germany)
👉 www.idiv.de/career/job-o...
#JobAlert #ITJobs #Biodiversity #iDiv

Canopy openings can harm the biodiversity of dung #beetles 🪲: Scientists of the University of Würzburg examined 234 areas in eleven #forests across Germany. Rising temperatures exacerbate the problem. ➡️ www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-... 📸 Johanna Asch

Still time to submit an abstract to the BE20 meeting! Please share.

A Shapiro-Wilk test of the response variable concludes very significant deviation of Normality. But residuals of linear model consistent with Normal distribution.

Visual check of the linear model with DHARMa

Periodic reminder that we should avoid testing the Normality of the response variable.

For a linear model, what matters is the Normality of residuals (and not that much). Visual checks better than test. #statistics

📖Published!

Food webs on green roofs are unique but less robust than their ground-level counterparts

Green roofs offering novel environmental conditions, increasing urban habitat diversity and supporting denser but less robust food webs compared with ground-level habitats🌳🏙️

🔎 buff.ly/XxwXsct

The @terra-cluster.org is offering another position - this time @sgn.one in Frankfurt: Interested in global vegetation or biome modeling - then apply. The position is open for #PhD and for #Postdocs 😀

Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Climate Change Ecology  (295093) | University of Bergen Job title: Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Climate Change Ecology  (295093), Employer: University of Bergen, Deadline: Sunday, March 8, 2026

🌍Come work with us!
We are hiring a postdoc in Climate Change Ecology. In this position, you will work on Climate Change synthesis research, and assist the upcoming IPCC report (CH14: impacts on terrestrial, freshwater and cryosphere) 🌿🐸❄️ Deadline: 8 March

More information: tinyurl.com/2c83uakz

Diagram showing main drivers of insect biodiversity change with interconnected arrows between five labeled photos: invasive alien species with a sphecid wasp on a plant, land use change with agricultural machinery, natural resource extraction with a sandy landscape, climate change with clouds in the sky, and pollution with industrial smokestacks.

Why are insects declining — and what can we do about it? A new review synthesises current evidence: habitat loss, land-use change, climate change and pollutants are key drivers reshaping insect communities worldwide. #LIBresearch

© Scherber et al., CC BY 4.0 @cscherber.bsky.social

1/2

Eawag 2-year postdoc fellowship in Switzerland. Funding for Independent projects hosted in one of the research departments… come join us in Switzerland 🇨🇭! apply.refline.ch/673277/1335/...

More than mitigation: The role of forests in climate adaptation Forests regulate global and local climates in ways that impact human well-being. In this Review, we discuss the scale-dependent mechanisms through which forests regulate climate, highlighting their co...

More than mitigation: The role of forests in climate adaptation | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

www.uni-goettingen.de/en/3240.html...
Hidden insect diversity in grass shoots threatened by mowing

Our paper with Teja, Péter, and Stefan, "The hidden multitrophic diversity of specialized grass-shoot insects – neglected by grassland management," is published in @basicapplecol.bsky.social. It emphasizes the need for unmown refuges to support persistent insect populations.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ba...

wow, thanks a lot! Sorry for giving reviewer vibes at a point where you should have been past that :D I was just curious and I find it very interesting that it's such a strong effect. Cool!

📢 iDiv and @unileipzig.bsky.social are hiring Technical Staff (m/f/d) for the BioDive4Soil soil biodiversity project! 🌍🔬 Work includes lab soil analyses, field sampling, data prep & supporting student assistants.🧪
65 % part-time | until 31 Dec 2029 | apply by 24 Feb 2026
www.idiv.de/career/job-o...

📖 Published!

High-throughput information extraction of printed specimen labels from large-scale digitization of entomological collections using a semi-automated pipeline🖥️ 🐞

🔎

Cool :) I mean, I am just fishing here of course, but it's an interesting result. Might also be a case of a very strong other predictor that left little variance to explain. Or it makes sense ecologically (competition, no redundancy, as discussed in the paper) :D

Cool work! I find it remarkable that alpha functional diversity had a negative impact on stability. I wonder if that's possibly related to equally weighing all species in the Rao's Q calculation? Maybe it would be different when weighing by relative abundances?

Klara Mrak, zusammen mit Christina Hackmann Erstautorin der Studie, extrahiert mit einer Druckkammer Wasser aus Zweigen. Dadurch kann sie die Ankunftszeit der in den Boden injizierten stabilen Isotope von Wasserstoff und Stickstoff in der Baumkrone abschätzen. © Christina Hackmann

Wie nutzen Bäume Wasser und Stickstoff aus dem tieferen Boden? Forschende haben verfolgt, wie sie beides aufnehmen und von der Wurzel zur Krone leiten. Ergebnis: Stickstoff kommt verzögert oben an. Und Douglasien sind im #Klimawandel im Vorteil. Details lesen: www.uni-goettingen.de/de/3240.html...

The highlights of our new study summarized as a press release!
⚠️ This is what can happen if two PhD students decide they have not yet had enough and want to do collaborative research. Worth it!

@mrakklara.bsky.social
@sharathpaligi.bsky.social
@wileyecology.bsky.social

Fig. 3. Percentage of reads attributed to carabid, prey and other for Nebria salina and Poecilus cupreus for samples from 2013 to 2019 and 2021. Colors distinguish between (a) prey reads (green), (b) carabid reads (blue) and (c) other reads (contaminants and not assigned – orange). Proportions are given as percentages of the total number per sample (after filtering the singletons).

Fig. 5. Prey diversity in the diet of Nebria salina (a) and Poecilus cupreus (b) through time. Each dot represents the diet of one carabid specimens, dots are jittered horizontally and vertically for more clarity. The curve corresponds to a linear regression with the grey area displaying the 95 % confidence interval.

🪲 New BAAE article:

Metabarcoding of stored carabid beetles reveals declining prey diversity over the last decade. Temporal diet shifts highlight long-term invertebrate declines and the value of historical collections for monitoring.

DOI: doi.org/10.1016/j.ba...
@gfoesoc.bsky.social

📢 We’re hiring!
We’re looking for an enthusiastic and highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to join our team at @funcagroeco.bsky.social

The position focuses on how collaborative agri-environment measures affect multiple taxa and ecosystem services.

See: www.uni-goettingen.de/en/vacancy+f...

A few more days left to apply for our postdoc position on insect community ecology.