Tanja Straka

Berlin

Tanja is a guest professor in Urban Ecology at the Freie Universität Berlin, with a habilitation (venia legendi in Urban Ecology) from the University of Münster. Tanja’s academic background includes Postdoctoral research at the Technische Universität Berlin and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW), a Ph.D. in Urban Ecology from the University of Melbourne, and a German Diplom in Biology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since my PhD, she has passionate about combining ecological research with social science theories. I strongly believe that conservation is much more effective when we also understand people since, as we all know, most threats to nature and wildlife are caused by human behaviour. So, she loves to come from ‘both sides’: from the ecological as well as from the social science perspective to find solutions for ‘shared urban landscapes’ in which nature, wildlife, and people can coexist and thrive. When it comes to wildlife, Tanja’s major passion are bats. When it comes to human-nature interactions in urban areas, I am interested in landscape preferences, understanding drivers of acceptance (e.g. biodiversity management strategies), communication for conservation (e.g. photo stimuli, storytelling), and in her new project she is interested in exploring human-wildlife relationships in urban areas through social-ecological networks and in real-world settings through a living lab at the FU Berlin. Working with vibrant colleagues and students, she also enjoy conversations around ethics in conservation (acknowledging that our approach to science is never free from our own values).