My major interest during my biology studies at the Universities of Cologne, Moscow and Bremen was in polar marine ecology, studying the influence of different reproductive strategies on benthic invertebrate community structure. After receiving my diploma in biology, I joined the one-year graduate program on international affairs of the Robert Bosch Foundation to study the cooperation between the many actors in Central Asia, such as international organizations, regional and local institutions to mitigate the very complex and urgent problems in resource management and state transformation. During my work at the local UNESCO field office in Uzbekistan I assisted in the development of the Regional water-related Vision for the Aral Sea Basin that was presented within the framework of the World Water Vision.

The ecological goals of the vision became the focus of my current Ph.D. thesis at the Institute of Environmental Systems Research of the University of Osnabrueck. We are developing a GIS-based simulation tool to assess the ecological effects of alternative water management strategies on the delta area of the Amudarya river. The tool will be used for scenario analysis to demonstrate options for riverine ecosystem restoration based on a given hydrological regime. The research involves the development and coupling of different models for water management, changes in environmental variables and habitat suitability for selected species. It raises many questions such as how to deal with different temporal and spatial scales, the importance of spatial variation, the history of the system, the use of qualitative, descriptive ecological knowledge for modeling, how to deal with the high level of uncertainty in data and calculations, etc. . The work shall be a first step to make the existing vast scientific and empirical knowledge more easily available for decision making in natural resource management and education. Next to the above questions my research interests are:

• Theoretical aspects of ecosystem restoration such as the potential for rehabilitation of disturbed sites, the interventions needed to achieve restoration to a previous or desired state, the appropriate temporal and spatial scales for simulation and experiment, the quantification of functional relationships of the system and their exploration in experiment and modeling, etc.
• Approaches to modeling of ecological systems, allowing for spatial heterogeneity and making use of fuzzy knowledge
• The search for approaches to combine results/models in the natural sciences with those in the socio-economic fields, a prerequisite to explore options for sustainable development