Press release: Biodiversity change amidst disappearing human traditions
No. 154 - 17.10.2024
Researcher awarded Branco Weiss Fellowship to carry out research at Göttingen University
A Branco Weiss Fellowship – Society in Science has been awarded to Dr Gergana Daskalova. The fellowship funds Daskalova’s research project “Biodiversity change amidst disappearing human traditions and changing socio-economics”. She joins the Department of Conservation Biology at the University of Göttingen to work together with Professor Johannes Kamp. The five-year fellowship, which is worth over €530,000, will enable Daskalova to investigate the ecological and human fingerprints of land abandonment. Considering the question from both a local and a global perspective, Daskalova’s research will reveal what happens to nature when people leave, and how to make the best of the land left behind.
We are living amidst humanity’s largest ever migration, with more people leaving rural areas for urban centres than ever before. In less than 50 years, rural populations have decreased by 25%, creating demographic deserts and land no longer cultivated, with unknown consequences for nature and society. Daskalova’s research will bring together ecology, data science, remote sensing, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to shed new light on the interactions between humans and biodiversity. Her research will reveal how human migration and changing values and traditions influence biodiversity and what that means for nature conservation, human quality of life and likelihood of re-migration to rural areas.
In the first stage of her research, Daskalova will focus on Bulgaria – the quickest depopulating country in the world with a decrease from 9 to 6.5 million people between 1990 and 2021. She will conduct field studies across 30 villages spanning a gradient of depopulation. In the second stage, she will mobilize and collate open-access data to lead a global analysis of the impacts of changing socio-economics, bringing together issues such as aging rural populations, political shifts, and human conflict, and the effects on biodiversity change over space and time. The outputs of her research will capture both detailed relationships within abandonment, human culture and biodiversity, as well as broad-scale biodiversity patterns in a rapidly changing world.
Contact:
Dr Gergana Daskalova
University of Göttingen
Department of Conservation Biology
Bürgerstrasse 50, 37073 Goettingen, Germany
Email: gndaskalova@gmail.com / gergana.daskalova@biologie.uni-goettingen.de
Tel: +359 899808407