Theresia Widhalm

My research

Pollination processes are at the heart of well-functioning and resilient ecosystems, yet pollinators are currently facing multiple threats. My aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding and effective mitigation of disruptions within the intricate plant-pollinator networks in semi-natural grasslands.

Within my PhD project, I am interested in discovering

1. how pollinator declines influence plant community composition and plant trait expression in grassland plant communities
2. how pollinator-mediated changes in the plant community affect pollinators again in return, and
3. what these effects mean for ecosystem functioning and resilience to stressors like extreme weather events.

My background

I bring a background in global change ecology to this project, a specialization I chose for my master's degree at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) Vienna. In the past, I have also been involved in the Austrian Panel of Climate Change's interdisciplinary report on health, demography and climate change, studied a grassland butterfly facing challenges due to habitat fragmentation at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and worked as a field assistant in a project on pollinator exposure to pesticides in red clover fields here at Lund University.