Dr. Anja Guenther

Research interests:

Rapid environmental changes can lead to unpredictable abiotic and biotic conditions, forcing animals to rely on fast adjustment mechanisms to survive and adapt. The most immediate adaptive mechanism allowing populations to face these changes occurs at the individual level through phenotypic plasticity. The primary objectives of my work are to elucidate how developmental- and transgenerational plasticity helps or hinders small mammals to adjust to fast-changing environments and to characterise how living in human-altered environments affects animal behaviour and life history. To address these objectives, I use a combination of observations under natural or semi-natural conditions with experimental manipulations of the environment or internal states.