Team
Dr. Dr. Martin Drechsler studied physics at the universities of Braunschweig and Göttingen. He is senior researcher in the Department of Ecological Modelling at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. His fields of expertise include ecological, economic and ecological-economic modelling, optimization methods and environmental decision analysis.
Dr. Karin Johst studied physics at the Technical University of Dresden. She is an expert in ecological modelling and senior researcher in the Department of Ecological Modelling at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research. Her areas of research include ecological and ecological-economic modelling with particular focus on population and community dynamics in dynamic and disturbed landscapes and adaptation strategies to climate change.
Dr. Melanie Mewes works in the Department of Economics at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research as well as at the Brandenburg Technial University of Cottbus. She is landscape ecologist by training and has written her PhD in the interdisciplinary field of agricultural economics and ecology. Her current fields of research are biodiversity conservation, land use, cost-effective payment schemes, and decision support for policy making. Melanie Mewes is the manager of the Ecopay projects.
Dr. Astrid Sturm is a member of Work Group Theoretical Computer Science at the Institute of Computer Science of the Free University of Berlin. Her main research interest is algorithms and she has experience with working in open source projects (e.g. CGAL). She is responsible for the design and the implementation of the software tool Ecopay and the database as well as involved in the ecological module and the optimisation.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Frank Wätzold is Professor of Environmental Economics at the Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus. His research ares include the economic analysis of environmental policy instruments including their institutional framework and the preceding policy process, as well as the economic analysis of strategies and policies to conserve biodiversity, in particular with the support of ecological-economic models. Frank was the coordinator of the SOKO Bio-project and is coordinating the project Ecopay 2.0. He is especially involved in the conceptual development of the software.
