Doctoral candidate
Functional biodiversity in tropical smallholder farming
Tel: +49 (0)711 / 459-23605
e-mail: hannah.melcher@uni-hohenheim.de
Research project
For my PhD (2025–2029), I am studying biodiversity and ecosystem services in tropical smallholder agriculture within a socio-ecological context. With my research I aim to understand how ecological, economic, and social mechanisms interact, and which factors synergize to promote sustainability in small-scale farming systems. I am particularly interested in the functional diversity of birds and insects in relation to different land-use types and management practices.
My PhD is part of the BRIGHT-futures project, an interdisciplinary project funded by the Anton & Petra Ehrmann Foundation. This project seeks to identify already existing success stories - so called “bright spots” - in sustainable agriculture. By combining ecological and socio-economic research, a holistic approach is used to study these bright spots on farm level. We focus on farms that perform particularly well in terms of ecological and social sustainability. The research will be carried out in India, Kenya, Germany and Mexico. By including these diverse study regions, the project aims to gather a broad and representative data set to derive generalizable principles for sustainable agriculture.
During my PhD, I will focus on two study regions with contrasting agricultural systems: Wayanad (India) and Siaya (Kenya). Wayanad is located in the Western Ghats in southern India, a hilly region dominated by agroforestry and paddy cultivation. Many spices, coffee, coconut, banana and rubber are cultivated in small home gardens. The study site Siaya lies in western Kenya near Lake Victoria. Its open landscape is dominated by savanna grasslands which are mainly used as grazing grounds for cattle. In addition to livestock keeping, maize, beans, and bananas are important crops for local farmers. In my research, I will assess biodiversity in both regions along gradients of land-use intensity and farmer-network activity. Data collection will include household questionnaires, acoustic monitoring of birds and bats using audio recorders, and pitfall traps and yellow pan traps for insect sampling.
Based on this data, I aim to address the following research questions:
- How do different land-use practices affect biodiversity?
- Does a higher diversity of land-use practices enhance species richness and functional diversity on the farm level?
- Does the activity in a farmer network lead to a higher degree of exchange and knowledge and therefore a higher diversification of agricultural practices, enabling a higher biodiversity?
By the end of my thesis, recommendations for promoting biodiversity and ecosystem services in smallholder farming will be developed.
Short CV
In my bachelor's degree I studied Biology at the University of Bremen. During this study program I developed a keen interest in ecology and entomology. I continued my studies at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen in the master’s program Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution. Here I was able to acquire new methods, further expand my knowledge in animal ecology and gain experience in field ecology. In my master thesis I studied the effect of deadwood addition and forest gap formation on the food web of centipedes.
