Remo Ryser
Hi there! I'm Remo. I am an ecologist who fell in love with theory. I am currently an SNSF Ambizione junior group leader at the Institute of Plant Scineces at the University of Bern. From February 2027, I will start as Assistant Professor, building Network Ecology, a new division at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution.
During my undergraduate studies I conducted extensive fieldwork at night to understand how artificial light affects plant-pollinator networks. I quickly became fascinated by networks and their structure. Later, during an internship at the Natural History Museum, I worked on modelling phylogenetic trees from molecular and morphological data, and gathered my first experience with bioinformatic and computational tools.
I then moved to Leipzig for my PhD at iDiv, supervised by Uli Brose. There I extended a bioenergetic food-web model into space, incorporating spatially explicit landscapes of patches connected by species-specific dispersal. Using computer simulations, I explored how habitat isolation, patch size, and landscape heterogeneity drive the persistence of species and the stability of meta-food-webs. As a postdoc, I went on to study food-web assembly, spatial scales and processes, and artificial light at night.
What ties these questions together is a drive to understand the fundamental mechanisms that govern biodiversity and ecological processes — and to make that understanding useful for real decisions about a changing world.
Despite my love for theory, I remain an ecologist at heart and am endlessly fascinated by nature — astronomy and physics included. Nothing makes me feel freer than swimming in a river, hiking, or skiing in the mountains.
Selected publications
- Brose, U., Hirt, M. R., Ryser, R., Rosenbaum, B., Berti, E., Gauzens, B., Hein, A., Pawar, S., Schmidt, Wootton, K. L., & Kéfi, S. (2025). Embedding information flows within ecological networks. Nature Ecology & Evolution.
- Wilkinson, C., Brose, U., Dyer, A., Hirt, M., & Ryser, R. (2025). A mechanistic approach to animal dispersal — quantifying energetics and maximum distances. Ecology Letters, 28(2), e70085.
- Ryser, R., Hirt, M. R., Häussler, J., Gravel, D., & Brose, U. (2021). Landscape heterogeneity buffers biodiversity of simulated meta-food-webs under global change through rescue and drainage effects. Nature Communications, 12(1), 4716.
- Sanders, D., Hirt, M. R., Brose, U., Evans, D. M., Gaston, K. J., Gauzens, B., & Ryser, R. (2023). How artificial light at night may rewire ecological networks: concepts and models. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378(1892), 20220368.
- Ryser, R., Häussler, J., Stark, M., Brose, U., Rall, B. C., & Guill, C. (2019). The biggest losers: habitat isolation deconstructs complex food webs from top to bottom. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286(1908), 20191177.
- Knop, E., Zoller, L., Ryser, R., Gerpe, C., Hörler, M., & Fontaine, C. (2017). Artificial light at night as a new threat to pollination. Nature, 548(7666), 206–209.
