Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL

Current research

I work for the project Revision of the Red List of Lichens of Switzerland at the National Data and Information Centre of Swiss lichens (SwissLichens). The main goal of this project is to make national Red List assessments for 800-1000 lichen species using the criteria and categories proposed by the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature). That involves data collection (i.e., fieldwork), identification of the collected lichens, data handling, deciding which criteria to apply and how, summarizing/modelling all available data, verifying the validity of the results, and documenting the assessment in a transparent and reproducible way.

CV

since 2024 Scientific collaborator, WSL
2020 - 2023 PhD in Ecology and Evolution, WSL and University of Bern
2018 - 2020 Scientific assistant, WSL
2015 - 2018 MSc in Ecology and Conservation, University of Uppsala, Sweden
2011 - 2014 BSc in Biology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

PhD thesis

I wrote my PhD thesis within the Swiss Red List project for lichens. The final dissertation is available online (https://boristheses.unibe.ch/4822/) and consists of 3 main chapters:

  1. Assesses whether the dataset from the Swiss Red List of lichens is suitable to be used in hierarchical occupancy modelling. This manuscript has been published in Basic and Applied Ecology.
  2. Evaluates the extent of imperfect detection during data collection and how it affects estimates of species' frequencies. This manuscript has been published in Journal of Vegetation Science.
  3. Estimates the changes undergone by 329 epiphytic (i.e., tree-inhabiting) lichen species from the period 1995-2000 to 2018-2022. This manuscript will be submitted as soon as possible.

Projects

Publications