The past year has been an excit­ing one for me: tying together all the loose ends, final­iz­ing my PhD the­sis and look­ing for new endeav­ors and opportunities…

Most impor­tantly, after more than ten years at the Leib­niz Insti­tute of Eco­log­i­cal Urban and Regional Devel­op­ment (IOER) in Dres­den, I have left my pro­fes­sional or sci­en­tific cra­dle to head for an excit­ing Post­doc posi­tion at the Helmholtz Cen­tre for Envi­ron­men­tal Research (UFZ) in Leipzig. I have joined the Sci­ence Pol­icy Expert Group in the depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion Biol­ogy there in Jan­u­ary. This was def­i­nitely one of the best or mean­ing­ful deci­sions I have made in the past few years (if ever you come to ask your­self whether you should stay in a sit­u­a­tion that com­forts you, but doesn’t chal­lenge you any­more or go for some­thing new: go and get out­side your com­fort zone!).

I am work­ing mostly on two excit­ing projects and a bunch of other things. One is the “Net­work forum on bio­di­ver­sity research Ger­many” (if you want to know more check the web­site www.biodiversity.de) and the sec­ond is the EU Hori­zon 2020 project EKLIPSE where I am part of a highly enthu­si­as­tic team build­ing a net­work of knowl­edge and devel­op­ing a mech­a­nism for sup­port­ing bet­ter deci­sions on bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tem ser­vices based on best avail­able knowl­edge (for more infor­ma­tion and con­text see the web­site www.eklipse-mechanism.eu). In the con­text of this project I am cur­rently coor­di­nat­ing a request process that deals with the ques­tion how envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tors can sup­port busi­nesses in boost­ing their envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance and max­i­miz­ing pos­i­tive out­comes for bio­di­ver­sity (and bio­di­ver­sity off­sets may be one option to con­sider here).

So, despite these over­whelm­ing tasks, you see I haven’t left the off­sets world behind me and have no inten­tion so far to do so. In fact, after some reori­en­ta­tion phase, I am plan­ning on fur­ther under­pin­ning my off­sets related work. As a first step, I will get the book based on my PhD the­sis out (will keep you posted about this). Fur­ther on, I am look­ing for oppor­tu­ni­ties for projects, pub­li­ca­tions etc. – I’d be happy to col­lab­o­rate on this, please get back to me for any ideas! Also, if you have any strate­gic input or hints on the future of the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog, please let me know.

Mean­while win­ter has changed to an invig­o­rat­ing spring and I am on an excit­ing jour­ney – with lots of bio­di­ver­sity, some off­sets, quite some science-policy, grow­ing mean­ing­ful­ness, inspir­ing peo­ple that make me feel com­fort­able and a dodo from time to time… stay tuned!