We study the effect of different management strategies on biodiversity of woodland associated insects. We are principally interested in the management of protected woodland areas and their conservation potential. We explore the importance of traditional silvicultural practices, such as coppicing or wood-pasture, and their potential use in ecological restoration.

We are interested in which environmental factors drive the diversity and shape of communities of woodland associated insects. We study their assemblages in a wide variety of different woodland habitats and compare them on multiple levels. We explore the differences between communities and their underlying mechanisms to provide an explanation for their diversity as well as a means for their conservation.

Our focus is on the preservation of umbrella species and their habitats. Identification of habitat requirements, ranging from management practices on sites they occur to host tree parameters and surrounding environmental characteristics is necessary in order to better understand their ecology and provide guidelines for their conservation.

Knowledge of demography, phenology and dispersal ability of endangered species is crucial for developing effective conservation policies. To obtain such information methods such as mark-release-recapture (MRR) and radio-tracking has been employed for different species of (mostly saproxylic) beetles.

Using different molecular markers (mitochondrial and nuclear genes, microsatellites) we study the patterns of population genetic diversity and phylogeographic structure of the threatened saproxylic beetles in Europe. Such information may increase our knowledge of the species’ biology and facilitate more effective conservation.

The main proportion of our research aims focuses on spatial analyses in the landscape, which results in the change of components in the landscape cover and related changes in the overall landscape composition. Our work presents a spatial composition of maps characterizing possible changes in the landscape and prediction analyses of abundance or probability occurrence of the specific organism in the context of land use and land cover changes