Monika Egerer: About Those Wild Bees and Natural Enemies in Urban Gardens

Urban garden management can play an important role in supporting species diversity and the provision of insect-mediated services, says ecologist Monika Egerer, an assistant professor at Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany.

Egerer will speak on "Entomological Investigations in Urban Gardens," focusing on wild bees and natural enemies in urban gardens in Germany, at a virtual seminar hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology on Wednesday, Nov. 24. 

Her seminar begins at 4:10 p.m., Pacific Time. The Zoom link is here.

More than 60 percent of our world's population will live in cities in the next decades, Egerer says in her abstract. "Urban agriculture has great potential to support arthropod biodiversity and thereby potentially enhance ecosystem services such as pollination and pest predation for more sustainable food production. In this talk, I discuss interdisciplinary research on wild bees and natural enemies in urban community gardens in Berlin and Munich, Germany. Specifically, I examine how urban garden management can play an important role in supporting species diversity and the provision of insect-mediated services. Furthermore, I discuss citizen science initiatives that our group uses to engage the public in scientific research on urban biodiversity and ecosystem services."

Egerer, whose research and teaching interests include ecology, biodiversity, agroecology, urban ecology, insect ecology, climate change, and food systems, holds a bachelor's degree in biology (2013) from Kalamazoo College, Mich., and then received her master's degree (2017) and her doctorate (2019) in environmental studies from UC Santa Cruz, studying with major professor Stacy Philpott.

After research work in Australia, Egerer joined the Institute of Ecology at the Technical University of Berlin in 2019 as an International Postdoc Initiative (IPODI) postdoctoral fellow. In 2020, she was appointed to the professorship for Urban Productive Ecosystems in the TUM School of Life Sciences.

Her most recent peer-reviewed publications include:

The Department of Entomology and Nematology seminars are coordinated by nematologist and assistant professor Shahid Siddique, who may be reached at ssiddique@ucdavis.edu for any technical issues.