The Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation will fund a junior research group on “Forest-related environmental communication” at the Department of Forest Sciences in Tharandt (Chair of Forest Policy and Forest Resource Economics) with a total funding volume of just over EUR 1 million, starting in mid-2025.

One of the new junior research group's core tasks will be to ensure that courses in forest-related environmental communication are offered, expanded and optimized. The main goal is to increasingly plan, organize and implement teaching and learning methods that are geared even more towards practical application, such as forest education events, forest tours, tree planting campaigns, social media campaigns, news blogs, discussion forums, and forestry advice. In addition to teaching, the junior research group “Forest-related Environmental Communication” will also focus on research in this field and promote networking with internal and external TUD partners. One of the special features of research in Tharandt is the balanced consideration of both the protection and the use of forests, while the latter aspect is increasingly losing significance at other universities. It is therefore essential to explore how people's perceptions, attitudes and behavior towards forests are changing. Moreover, the new junior research group will investigate how citizens can participate in future forest development, how cooperation with and between different forest owners can be made more efficient, and how to better raise awareness of the risks and consequences of climate change for our forests and us as humans.

More information can be found in TU Dresdens official press release

* From left to right: Sandra Liebal (Team member of the Chair of Forest Policy and Forest Resource Economics) – Prof. Norbert Weber (Chair of Forest Policy and Forest Resource Economics) – Robert Mayr (Board of the Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation) – Michael von Winning (Board of the Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation) – Susann Pfeiffer (Manager of the funding priority Science & Research of the Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation)