Victoria Reuber

Fields of interest: Ecology and Evolution, Population Genetics, Conservation Ecology, Community Ecology

In my PhD thesis I am to disentangle the role of the endemic Giant Molerat (Tachyoryctes macrocephalus) as a natural biotic landscape engineer from anthropogenic transformation in the Bale Mountain National Park, Ethiopia. Specifically, I aim to analyze the current and ancient population genetic structure of this landscape engineer and relate it to environmental factors and anthropogenic transformation on a large spatial scale. These findings will help to understand the role of Giant Molerats as ecosystem engineers and their relationship with humans in order to reconstruct the landscape history of the Bale Mountain ecosystem. This study is part of a multidisciplinary research project called the “Mountain Exile Hypothesis: How humans benefited from and re-shaped African high-altitude ecosystems during Quaternary climatic changes”, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).