12.03.2025
The “Gesellschaft für Angewandte Carabidologie” (Society for Applied Carabidology) awards an annual prize for outstanding work in the field of applied carabidology. The prize bears the name of the deceased co-founder and long-standing chairman of the society: Müller-Motzfeld Prize.
Nadja Heitmann's doctoral thesis entitled “Ground-dwelling arthropods as mobile linkers for the phytopathogenic fungi Fusarium and Alternaria” was recognized as the best dissertation of 2024 at this year's annual conference of the Society for Applied Carabidology in Schloss Rauischolzhausen near Marburg/Gießen. Nadja presented the most important results of her dissertation in a lecture and impressively demonstrated the importance of ground beetles, which live in semi-natural habitats at the edges of kettle holes, as vectors of spores of various phytopathogenic fungi. Ms. Heitmann was able to detect more than 10 species of each of two important pathogenic and toxin-producing fungal genera, which are also transmitted by the ground beetles into the adjacent cereal field through their active running movements and can contribute to disease outbreaks there under suitable environmental conditions. The different ground beetle species connect the habitats soil, litter layer and plants through their movement and take up the spores, which adhere to their surface as well as being detected in the beetle's body. Ms. Heitmann was thus able to demonstrate for the first time the function of these ground beetles as mobile linkers for wheat-associated phytopathogenic fungi in agricultural ecosystems.
Ms. Heitmann's dissertation was jointly supervised by Dr. Marina Müller (PB1, FIA) and Dr. Michael Glemnitz (PB2, BIO), and the work was also integrated into the DFG-funded BioMove Research Training Group. In June 2024, Ms. Heitmann successfully defended her dissertation at BTU Cottbus- Senftenberg (https://doi.org/10.26127/BTUOpen-6917).
We would like to congratulate Ms. Heitmann on this research award and wish her continued success in her scientific work.
