I'm Merin, a macroecologist who loves to zoom out and explore the bigger picture of biodiversity—how it’s structured, where it’s found, and what threatens it. 

My journey started during my masters in the Soil Ecology & Global Change group at the University of Zurich, where I studied biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships across landscapes. During my PhD in the Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution group at ETH Zurich, I explored these questions further by building and comparing food webs across Swiss river catchments using a metaweb approach. I looked at how food web structure and robustness changes along environmental gradients, large and small.

Now, as a postdoc in the Biodiversity and Conservation Biology group at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, I’m zooming in to focus on urban green spaces to study how mutualistic and antagonistic interaction networks shift along urban gradients. I want to understand how urban densification and changing management practices influence biodiversity, and the ecosystem services provided by species interactions.

Interested in collaborating or to just chat about food webs, biodiversity, or network ecology? Feel free to reach out! 

If you are a BSc or MSc student looking for a project, please write me; I certainly have projects we can work on together.