Successful first three years for Above-Belowground Interaction Ecology Group
Junior professor Malte Jochum and his Above-belowground interaction ecology group have just completed their third year at JMU Würzburg. After a positive mid-term evaluation of the junior professorship in late 2025, we look back on three successful years and take a glimpse into what is to come.
Three years ago, in May 2023, Malte Jochum launched his research group “Above-belowground interaction ecology” at JMU Würzburg. His tenure-track junior professorship lasts for 3 + 3 years with both a mid-term and an end evaluation after 2 and 5 years, respectively. With the mid-term evaluation passed in late 2025, the group now celebrates its third anniversary at JMU Würzburg. It has been an exciting and very rewarding three years!
The group has grown to now include three Würzburg-based and one Leipzig-based, co-supervised PhD students with PhD projects focusing on different global-change stressors and their impacts on grassland above-belowground biodiversity and ecosystem performance. In addition, we have supervised several BSc and MSc thesis projects, for example on earthworm responses to grassland mowing regimes, or on above-belowground community changes across elevational gradients in the German Alps.
Together with the “Applied biodiversity science” group led by Nadja Simons, we have set up our lab and the soil animal extraction facilities and can now process decent numbers of soil and arthropod samples. The group is involved in and leads teaching in the realms of conservation biology and soil ecology.
We have very nicely settled in with the new chair of Global Change Ecology led by Christian Hof and, together, enjoy weekly meetings and coffee breaks as well as movie nights, work outings, and retreats. In 2025, Malte and colleagues won two science-communication awards for their work communicating soil biodiversity to kids around the globe.
Our research is enriched by collaborations with great colleagues in Würzburg, Germany, and several other places across the globe and we are grateful for their contributions to our work! Particularly, colleagues in the ecology and remote sensing departments in Würzburg, colleagues in the Biodiversity Exploratories or with the Global Change Experimental Facility, at iDiv in Leipzig, in Berchtesgaden and the UFS Schneefernerhaus, and colleagues in New Zealand or the US are integral parts of our projects.
We are constantly working on expanding from the currently-running DFG-funded project to more third-party funding. For example, we are waiting to hear back about a DFG proposal for working on above-belowground biodiversity and functioning under habitat fragmentation and seed addition in US experimental grasslands. Additionally, we are involved in the preparation of two DFG Collaborative Research Centres, one on insects under global warming and one on the impact of multisensory stressors on grassland arthropods. Together with Würzburg colleagues, we are working on a collaborative grant proposal on biodiversity in solar parks. Finally, Malte is leading the DeerForest initiative preparing a DFG Research Unit proposal studying roe-deer impacts on temperate forest biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
We are grateful for all the support we received by colleagues, admin, the university, and collaborators over the past three years and we are very much looking forward to continuing our research and teaching endeavours together over the coming years!
