Research and current projects
I am an expert in Environmental Sciences, Policy and Management with a special interest in the relationship between humans and nature, as originally come from the field of social sciences. I am currently working at the ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research as a Research Scientists in the field ‚Biodiversity and people‘. From November 2017 to 2023, I performed a PhD project on the “Socio-cultural Dynamics of Ecosystem Services” with Dr. Peter Manning (SBiK-F) and Prof. Dr. Blättel-Mink (Department of Social Sciences of Goethe University) as my main supervisors. One of the main tasks of this project was to analyze why, when and how specific stakeholder groups or individuals are using Ecosystems Services and how trade-offs between these groups could be solved. To get a deep insight into these issues, the practical parts of the three-year project were field studies within the three German regions of the Biodiversity Exploratories project. The outcome is the identification of land management strategies that deliver ecosystem multifunctionality in grasslands and forests.
From 2016-2017 I worked as a Junior Researcher in the Institute for Social Ecology, focusing on Social Sustainability and the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods. Before this, I completed a master’s program with a thesis about how to measure the societal impact of sustainability projects, in cooperation with the Wuppertal Institute. This demonstrated my passion to first think in a holistic way and also to generate societal impact to promote sustainable development.
Sophie Peter 