Project coordination: Dr. Almut Schneider
Duration: since February 2026
Foundation: Adickes-Foundation
Members
Activities
The Biocultural Diversity Network focuses on the relationships from which biological and cultural diversity arise – and within which they are constantly evolving. Through gardens, pastures, river landscapes and collections in Frankfurt/Rhine-Main, we investigate how biological diversity is linked to everyday practices, knowledge and the history of urban places. We do not view biocultural diversity as a given state, but rather as something that emerges from the coexistence of people, plants and animals – and is shaped by activities such as tending, protecting, collecting and organising.
The network brings together researchers from Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region who are exploring such relationships from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The approaches involved draw on social and cultural anthropology, biology and botany, archaeology and archaeobotany, literary and cultural studies, as well as biodiversity research, nature conservation and other related fields.
We regard Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region not merely as the network’s base, but as a shared space for research and dialogue. The places and materials under investigation reveal how nature is perceived, organised and brought into being. The city thus appears both as a living space and as a multi-layered archive: within it, ecological processes, human interventions, the migration of species and knowledge, memories, plans and visions for the future are layered upon one another.
Taking specific places, practices and stories as our starting point, we develop shared research questions: How are landscapes and habitats maintained, altered and assessed? What becomes visible when different disciplines examine the same place? Which forms of knowledge complement one another – and where do points of friction persist?
We explore these questions together: through fieldwork and archive sessions, exploratory projects, discussions and events, as well as joint ethnographic field trips. Walking together reveals just how many different interpretations a single place allows – and what only becomes apparent through exchange. Methods and disciplinary approaches should be able to interact with one another. It is precisely from this interaction that new questions, new perspectives and collaborative research emerge.
The network is preparing its first joint pilot projects for 2027. In these, researchers from various disciplines will jointly investigate selected places and topics in Frankfurt/Rhine-Main and put the interplay of their methods to the test in practice. The insights and experiences gained in this way will form the basis for further joint research.
For more information, please contact:
Almut Schneider
Members
© K. Witt
Prof. Dr Roland Borgards, Modern German Literary Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt
Roland Borgards comes from literature to animals. As a literary scholar, he studies literary texts in their relationships to the history of knowledge, to social processes and to political positionings. His focus is above all on animals as multimodal existences. The look into a nightingale poem, the data of biological nightingale research, the experience of a nightingale night, the protection of a nightingale habitat – all of this is interwoven in the sense of biocultural diversity.
This becomes apparent in individual animal species (such as the nightingale), in individual authors (a hundred different animal species in Georg Büchner!) or in specific ‘naturecultures’ (a river with its human and more-than-human living beings). In literary history there are some particularly relevant epochs, such as Romanticism with its proximity to the philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie), or the Anthropocene present with genres such as climate fiction or nature writing.
In the Biocultural Diversity Network, his main aim will be to determine the role of literature and literary studies for socio-ecological transformation processes. Does it make a difference – and indeed a difference for our planetary community – whether nightingale poems are read or not? There is not yet an established set of methods for such questions. It is precisely this that is to be developed within the network as Transformative Literary Studies.
Prof. Dr. Borgards at Goethe University
Prof. Dr. Borgards at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften
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Prof. apl. Dr. Susanne Fehlings, Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology
Susanne Fehlings comes from bazaars and urban landscapes to trees and gardens. As a social anthropologist, she is interested in how people live with plants and in the cultural worlds that unfold around them. Pomegranates and other tree species have become a particular focus of her work. Her research has taken her across post-Soviet Eurasia: to Crimea, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus.
During extended periods of fieldwork, she explored cemeteries, bazaars, and rapidly changing cities. These places reveal how history continues to shape everyday life and how relationships between people, other living beings, things, and ideas change over time.
Within the Biocultural Diversity Network, she turns her attention to domestic and allotment gardens in Frankfurt. Together with others, she wants to explore what grows there – and how it gets there. What is planted, what is allowed to remain, and what simply grows alongside? She is interested in how cultural ideas and everyday practices produce and transform biodiversity. In this way, gardens become places where far-reaching relationships are condensed into just a few square metres.
Prof. Dr. Susanne Fehlings at Frobenius Institute
Prof. Dr. Susanne Fehlings at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
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Dr. Felix Gaschick, Frankfurt Conservation Center (FCC)
Felix Gaschick starts from international conservation practice and turns to Frankfurt. His perspective on biocultural diversity centres on the question of how nature and its conservation can be more firmly embedded as a foundation for social and economic action. He is interested in how biodiversity is connected with local and Indigenous knowledge, cultural practices, social structures, and political and economic decision-making.
For many years, he worked in international development cooperation and conservation, mainly in Asia. In the Philippines, his work included Indigenous knowledge of tree species and the documentation and transmission of this knowledge. Drawing on these experiences, he coined the term “de-projectisation of conservation”. By this, he means embedding nature, biodiversity and their conservation more permanently in social, cultural, institutional and economic structures.
Today, Felix heads the Frankfurt Conservation Center. For him, the Biocultural Diversity Network embodies precisely the kind of collaboration that the FCC seeks to advance in Frankfurt: researchers and practitioners from different disciplines and institutions bring their perspectives together, develop shared questions, and then work jointly towards answering them.
Dr. Felix Gaschik at the Frankfurt Conservation Center
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Prof. Dr. Roland Hardenberg, Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology
Roland Hardenberg comes from the study of the cultural significance of resources to biocultural diversity. As a social and cultural anthropologist, he assumes that the categories “nature” and “culture”—and their equivalents in various languages—are expressions of different cultural classifications of the relationships between people and their environment. Our task as cultural anthropologists is, among other things, to describe this diversity of cultural constructions of the world and to highlight their relevance for social coexistence and our relationship with the environment.
For example, in India, he has conducted research on the cultural conceptions of and approaches to millet and rice in the lived worlds of both Hindu farmers and animist shifting cultivators. Roland brings to the network insights into the diverse, and at times radically different, ways of perceiving and interacting with “nature”. At the same time, he hopes to gain from the network a better understanding of the diverse characteristics of plants, animals, and geological phenomena on which the various constructions of the world are based.
Prof. Dr. Roland Hardenberg at Frobenius Institute
Prof. Dr. Roland Hardenberg at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
© A. Schneider
Dr. Julia Krohmer, Scientific Coordination, Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, Frankfurt
Julia Krohmer starts from the West African savannas and turns to urban nature. As a botanist and geoecologist, she is interested in how people perceive, distinguish and value biodiversity – and in how perception, knowledge and cultural patterns of classification intersect.
In her doctoral research at Goethe University Frankfurt, she studied environmental perception and classification among different Fulbe groups in Burkina Faso and Benin. For many years now, her attention has focused closely on Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region. Her work centres on plants and trees in urban environments and on the question of how their diversity can be made visible, communicated and valued by society. In participatory projects such as Krautschau and the completed MainStadtbaum project, she has explored often overlooked forms of urban nature, bringing research, urban communities and local initiatives into conversation.
As a science coordinator at Senckenberg, Julia Krohmer works at the interface of research, knowledge transfer and networking. She enriches the network with her botanical perspective, but above all with her many years of experience in participatory formats and her extensive knowledge of Frankfurt’s biodiversity landscape. This also opens up ways of exploring how plants and urban habitats are perceived, valued, communicated and conserved.
Dr. Julia Krohmer in Science coordination Senckenberg
Link to the project "Krautschau"
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Prof. Dr. J. F. Niek Scheepens, Evolutionary Plant Ecology, Goethe University Frankfurt
Niek comes from the adaptability of plants to the diversity that emerges in urban gardens. As an evolutionary ecologist, he studies how plants respond to changing environmental conditions – through phenotypic plasticity and evolutionary adaptation. He is particularly interested in how quickly such processes take place and where their limits lie.
To this end, he combines field and greenhouse experiments with population genetic approaches. In so-called resurrection ecology, for example, he grows decades-old seeds from seed banks together with present-day descendants of the same populations. This makes visible how plants have adapted to changing conditions within just a few decades.
In the Biocultural Diversity Network, Niek turns this perspective to Frankfurt's allotment gardens. Together with anthropologists, he aims to investigate what is grown there, how the diversity of cultivated plants differs between gardens, and what relationships exist between plant choice, use and cultural experiences. Plant-ecological and ethnographic approaches are to be deliberately brought into relation with one another. In this way, allotment gardens become places where biological diversity, everyday practices and cultural exchange can be observed in close quarters.
Prof. Dr. J. F. Niek Scheepens Department at Goethe University
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Dr. Almut Schneider, Project Coordinator, Biocultural Diversity Network, Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology
Almut Schneider starts from grasslands and turns to the city. As a cultural anthropologist, she is interested in landscapes as constellations of living relations between people, animals and plants, work and care, political decisions and historical change.
Her research in the European Alps began in South Tyrol, with meadows, mountain farmers and dairy farming. From there, she moved one altitudinal zone higher: to the alpine pastures of Switzerland, to shepherds and sheep. Together with ecologists, she studied the biodiversity of these grasslands; ethnographically, she asked how it is entangled with land use, knowledge, values and political regulations. In this sense, the biodiversity of these landscapes tells a story of the relationships that have shaped them over time – and whose transformation is now contributing to its decline in many places.
Within the Biocultural Diversity Network, she brings this perspective to Frankfurt/Rhine-Main. She is interested in the life histories of urban places and, in particular, in peri-urban pastoralism: in sheep and shepherds at the edges of the city, and in landscapes that are created and sustained through grazing.
As coordinator of the network, she brings researchers from different disciplines into conversation. At its heart is a question: What happens when different disciplines look at the same place – and do not see the same thing?
Dr. Almut Schneider at Frobenius Institute
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Prof. apl. Dr Astrid Stobbe, Laboratory for Archaeobotany of Europe and Western Asia, Goethe University Frankfurt
Astrid Stobbe comes from pollen and seeds to the histories of entire landscapes. As an archaeobotanist, she works at the intersection of biology and archaeology. Her research explores relationships between people and their environments: How have humans transformed landscapes – and how, in turn, have environmental conditions shaped human life? Using fossil pollen, seeds, and fruits, she investigates diet, land use, and landscape change, as well as the effects of environmental transformations on settlement patterns and economic systems.
Her research spans the past 10,000 years and reaches across different regions of the world, with a particular focus on the Eurasian Steppe, the Carpathian Basin, the German Central Uplands, and the Rhine-Main region. The latter is a long-settled landscape that has been used for agriculture since the Neolithic period, around 7,500 years ago.
Within the Biocultural Diversity Network, Astrid is particularly interested in how biodiversity has changed over time – and how millennia of human use and intervention have shaped the landscapes and biological diversity of Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region.
Prof. Dr. Astrid Stobbe at Goethe University
© privatProf. Dr Stefan Wanke, Biodiversity and Molecular Evolution of Flowering Plants, Goethe University Frankfurt and Senckenberg Frankfurt
Stefan Wanke’s research ranges from extreme plant life forms to urban flora. As a botanist, he is interested in how flowering plants evolve, how they are related and how they adapt to their habitats. He is particularly fascinated by plants that go their own way: parasites that infiltrate their hosts and, in doing so, have relinquished almost everything that is commonly associated with a plant.
His research combines systematics, phylogenomics and evolutionary biology. His focus is on the broomrape family, parasitic plant groups and the pineapple family. Field research in Kenya has shown him the significance of parasitic plants for agriculture and local communities.
In Frankfurt, his research group at Senckenberg focuses on urban flora. This includes the Frankfurt biotope mapping project – a database, built up over many years, detailing what grows where and how habitats are changing. As spokesperson for biodiversity within the ‘Sustainability & Biodiversity’ research area at Goethe University and for cross-institutional botany at Senckenberg, he combines university and research institute work.
Within the Biocultural Diversity network, he contributes this floristic and evolutionary biological perspective. The data on Frankfurt’s flora is intended to spark a dialogue with questions from the field of cultural studies: What grows in the city, who plants, tends or tolerates it – and what can be discerned when botanical and cultural perspectives come together?
Activities
Working Meetings
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8 December 2025 · Frobenius Institute - Kick-off: Biocultural diversity as a shared field of research
At an initial Science Brunch, researchers from different disciplines came together to explore possible shared approaches to biocultural diversity. They discussed fundamental questions about the relationship between biological and cultural diversity as well as initial fields of research – from urban biodiversity and gardens to cultural landscapes and wood pastures. It quickly became clear how differently the participating disciplines use concepts, scales and methods. At the same time, the idea emerged of making precisely these differences the starting point for longer-term interdisciplinary collaboration.
The initial exchange led to a shared desire to bring the different disciplinary perspectives together within a common network.
© A. Schneider
1 April 2026 · Senckenberg Natural History Museum - From a shared topic to a network
At the second working meeting, the initiative was broadened to include a wider range of disciplines, and plans for an interdisciplinary network in Frankfurt took more concrete shape. At the heart of the discussion was how “biocultural diversity” could serve as a shared research approach without prematurely harmonising different ways of thinking and working. Particularly productive was the idea of starting from concrete phenomena and examining them together from different perspectives. Gardens and other urban spaces emerged more clearly as possible fields for shared research.
The discussion thus increasingly shifted from shared conceptual work to the question of how interdisciplinary collaboration could be tested in practice.
© R. Feuser · Courtesy of the Werner Reimers Stiftung29 July 2026 · Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Bad Homburg - Retreat: Testing collaboration in practice
At the retreat in Bad Homburg, smaller, concrete joint explorations in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region moved to the centre of attention. Pilot projects are intended both to facilitate research and to help participants familiarise themselves with the methods and ways of thinking of other disciplines through collaborative work. Gardens and green spaces emerged as a particularly suitable first area for experimentation, while other topics and sites remained explicitly open. A key idea was to have different disciplinary perspectives initially work on the same places or phenomena without prematurely merging their methods.
This led to a working model in which different disciplines examine the same place from their own perspectives – making the differences between their observations a starting point for collaborative research.
27 August 2026 · Frobenius Institute - From pilot ideas to a shared way of working
The follow-up meeting developed the idea of starting several small pilot projects in Frankfurt in 2027 rather than defining an overarching research question at this stage. A joint project on Frankfurt’s allotment gardens became particularly concrete; other topics discussed included urban plant-gathering practices, historical botany, literature and songbirds, as well as peri-urban grazing. Walking together through specific places emerged as a connecting format: researchers from different disciplines explore together what becomes visible through the perspectives of others. The individual projects do not need to be brought together under a single research question from the outset.
The network is thus increasingly approaching Frankfurt/Rhine-Main as a shared space of research and resonance, in which new connections become visible through working together.
14 November 2026 · Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Bad Homburg - Workshop: Developing the 2027 pilot projects
At the autumn workshop, the ideas developed so far are to be turned into concrete joint projects for 2027. The central question is which places, themes and materials lend themselves to smaller interdisciplinary pilot projects and which disciplines could work together in each case. Existing proposals – from allotment gardens and urban plant-gathering practices to peri-urban grazing, literature, historical sources and botanical archives – will be developed further, related to one another and assessed for their practical feasibility. Plans will also be made for joint exploratory walks, field and methods days, and ways of involving students.
The workshop is intended to mark the transition from conceptual work to the first joint research projects.
Conferences and Academic Exchange
31 May – 3 June 2026 · Montpellier - Annual Conference of the Society for Ethnobotany
Roland Hardenberg and Almut Schneider attended the Annual Conference of the Society for Ethnobotany in Montpellier. The conference provided an opportunity to engage with ethnobotanical approaches and international research on relationships between plants, knowledge and cultural practices, and to relate these to the questions pursued by the network.
Almut Schneider attended the World Biodiversity Forum in Davos. Discussions focused on current international debates in biodiversity research and its societal dimensions. Of particular relevance to the network was how different disciplines conceptualise biodiversity and the points of connection between ecological, social science and cultural studies perspectives.
