Intro

Hi, welcome! This is my personal website mostly about my science stuff. I’m Friederike but everyone calls me Frieda. I’m a biologist currently living in Prague, Czechia but moving to Sweden soon, where I’ll start a new PhD in October on the Evolution of Biomes on Madagascar at Stockholm University.

Growing up in a small German village near Bonn, I practically lived in the woods covered in mud catching tadpoles and grasshoppers where I’ve felt at home among the leaves and grasses since I can remember.

Bachelor studies & activities

Following my high school graduation, I quickly moved to Leipzig, where I did my bachelor’s and master’s in biology, and biodiveristy, ecology and evolution respectively (2019, 2021). During my bachelor studies and student jobs (2016-2019), I mostly focussed on botany, genetics and plant biotechnological subjects, but through unplanned circumstances, I found my passion in exploring the bigger things in nature. In 2019 I finished my bachelor’s thesis at iDiv, where I explored the secret drivers of soil microbes and their productivity across global drylands. The thesis was mostly focussed on laboratory work with soil samples, but also included spatial macroecological modelling.

Microplastics internship

Right after I handed in my thesis, I headed to Coquimbo, Chile to do a DAAD-funded research intership on microplastics pollution in the South Pacific at BEDIM at Universidad Católica del Norte contributing with lab and field work to the following publication: Sea-Surface Slicks and Their Effect on the Concentration of Plastics and Zooplankton in the Coastal Waters of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Masters studies & activities

When I returned to Leipzig, I started a student job at iDiv in the Eisenhauer Lab to count and determine invertebrate samples from an experimental insect decline project and do fieldwork on the MyDiv BEF experimental site in Bad Lauchstädt. When COVID hit, I had to refocus my work to computational studies and started my master’s thesis with Renske Onstein at iDiv on the macroecology & macroevolution of fruit size in plants(see New Phytologist paper from 2023 or State of the Worlds Plants & Fungi 2023 report, Chapter 4).

PhD activities

In September 2023 I joined Petr Keil’s Modeling of Biodiversity Lab at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Czechia, for a PhD in Spatial Sciences. I worked on universal patterns of temporal biodiversity change in spatial data. There is a preprint out that I did during my first year on predicting temporal change from a single snapshot of a species’ distribution and geometric features of that range. I am currently finishing this project up, because I’ll leave the PhD position and Czech Republic in July due to personal reasons.

During the time in Prague, I collaborated with my colleagues for their projects (e.g., Soria et al. ), spent numerous hours double-, triple- and quadruple-checking datasets that were harmonized by my colleague, and finished all formal PhD requirements for four years within the first year.

I am currently organizing my move to Sweden for a fresh start in autumn 2025 and will update this page once things have been officially settled.

Other activities

During my PhD in Prague, I joined a European Grassland project for which I spent a couple of weeks in the field, sampling grassland plots along the Czech-Austrian border in 2024.

Following my contract termination at CZU in Prague in July 2025, I started working on Rpackage development and writing unit tests with Ondřej Mottl for RRatepol. A package for estimating rate of change (RoC) from paleoecological community data in time series (e.g., Fossils, Pollen). More infos here.