Award ceremony in a double pack: awards for outstanding theses
On 23 November 2021, three students from the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE) were awarded the Johannes Schubert and Gunther Wolf Prizes for their outstanding final theses.
Hanna Lietz and Leonard Lehmeier, students on the bachelor's degree programme "International Forest Ecosystem Management" at the Faculty of Forest and Environment, were honoured with the Johannes Schubert Foundation Prize. The Gunter Wolff Prize went to Hannah Wiemers from the Faculty of Sustainable Business.
The relevance of near-natural forest management
Hanna Lietz's thesis entitled "Forest succession dynamics after storm disturbances by the example of Szast Protected Forest in northeastern Poland" was supervised by Prof. Dr Peter Spathelf (HNEE) and Prof. Dr hab. Dorota Dobrowolska (Instytut Badawczy Leśnictwa (ILB)). In the following video, Hanna Lietz reveals more about her thesis and the motivation behind her dedication to this topic.
Understanding the behaviour of Mecklenburg red deer
Leonard Lehmeier's final thesis was on "Strip area sizes of transmitter-marked red deer in the Ueckermünde Heath (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern)", which was supervised by Dr Frank-Uwe Michler (HNEE) and Benjamin Gillich (HNEE).
"As part of his Bachelor's thesis, Mr Lehmeier carried out extensive analyses of the space-time behaviour of transmitter-marked red deer in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Mr Lehmeier presented the results of his analyses on space use in numerous illustrative figures as well as in clear tables, making it easy for readers to familiarise themselves with the topic," summarises Prof. Gillich. "As large animals usually have little space in our densely populated and intensively utilised cultural landscape, new findings are always welcome in order to make the coexistence of humans and animals more pleasant. For me personally, it was also an enriching experience to get a feeling for the daily and annual cycle of individual animals - even if this feeling is difficult to visualise in the graphs and tables," says the award winner about his personal motivation for the topic.
Information and communication in times of a pandemic
Hannah Wiemers focussed on a very topical issue in her final thesis. She explored the question of what digital skills citizens have acquired as a result of the coronavirus measures and answered her question based on documented observations of changes in everyday life. The "Logbook of Changes" served as a framework and data source.
About the Gunther Wolff Prize
The Gunther Wolff Prize has been awarded annually at HNEE since 2015. The aim is to recognise pioneering work by students. At the same time, it honours the work of the founding rector of Eberswalde University of Applied Sciences, who died in 2013 and to whom the university owes its explicit profile in the green sector - the "green thread", as he called it at the time, which was successfully spun into the "University for Sustainable Development" and the "greenest university in Germany" in the years that followed.
About the Johannes Schubert Prize
The purpose of the Johannes Schubert Foundation is to promote and honour scientific work by particularly talented students at the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development in the field of ecology or meteorology. With this in mind, prizes have been awarded since 1996 for outstanding scientific achievements in the context of diploma, bachelor's or master's theses. The prizes are awarded in memory of Professor Dr Johannes Schubert (1859 - 1947) and are usually endowed with € 1000 per thesis.