Forest ecology

Despite all the efforts of hunters and land managers, roe deer fawns are still injured during spring mowing. More fawns could be saved if we knew where roe deer mothers prefer to place their fawns, and which bed sites the fawns actually choose within a meadow. To answer these questions, more than 600 bed sites throughout Bavaria were characterised and analysed in a research project.

To reinforce biodiversity in a stand and thus improve its resilience, it makes sense to know which tree-related microhabitats are present, and to preserve and favour them through adapted management practices.

The GRIMO project is concerned with the rewetting of a wooded fen in the Griessenbacher Moos bog. The project tries to break new ground in several respects: Peatlands in privately-owned forests and forested fens have only rarely been rewetted to date, because most peatlands in the forest tackled so far have been raised bogs in state-owned forests.

The Alpine region: on the one hand a habitat for wild animals, on the other hand an increasingly popular recreational area. But when humans and wild animals meet, there is often a clash of interests. Raising the sensitivity of recreational visitors to the needs of wildlife can help to preserve the Alpine region as a wildlife habitat. To be successful in this, we need to take a closer look at how people use their leisure time, and at their motivation.

As an adaptive corvid, the jackdaw learnt very early on how to use the advantages of human settlements and cultivated landscapes for itself. Today, it has to come to terms with increasingly rapid structural change.

The pre-Christmas and Christmas season is peak season here for nuts and nut fruits. As well as the classics - hazelnuts, almonds and walnuts - exotic nut species such as cashews, Brazil nuts and macadamia nuts also find their way on to our tables at Christmas time. And many Christmas markets and pedestrian zones would of course not be the same in winter without the scent of roasted chestnuts.

The whitebeam is Tree of the Year 2024 - but due to its low competitive ability, it is a rarity in Bavaria. On problem sites or damaged areas, however, this pioneer tree species can make the most of its advantages - and defy drought and extreme radiation.

Every fifth adult deer examined in the Bavarian part of the project area was infected with the giant American liver fluke. In the Šumava National Park, it was even more than every fourth adult that was infected. In cooperation with other partners, the Bavarian Institute of Forestry (LWF) has investigated the spread of this introduced parasite and its effects on wildlife.

Raccoons have been living in Swiss forests several decades. Unlike in central Germany where the animals, originally introduced from America, have in many places become a plague, they are not yet very many in Switzerland.

In order to protect ecologically and economically valuable oak forests from widespread defoliation by feeding, areas particularly heavily infested with the gypsy moth have sometimes in recent years been treated with the plant protection product MIMIC®. How this affects bats as a "non-target organism group" has been investigated in a study carried out by the Bavarian Institute of Forestry (LWF).

It is not often that new mammal species are discovered in our latitudes. Accordingly, there was great excitement among experts when the Alcathoe bat was detected in Bavaria for the first time in 2012 - a bat species that is very closely associated with old deciduous forests.

For many years, beech forests were considered to be species-poor, then exactly the opposite - i.e. particularly species-rich. Neither was the case. In fact it is correct to say that beech forests have a certain species diversity (medium to lower average in number of species), but that these include very few specialised species and endemics.