Niklas is both an environmental scientist and a student of science and technology studies (STS). He holds the MSc-equivalent degree of Diplom-Geoökologe (University of Potsdam, 2009, distinction) and graduated from Lancaster's MA programme Society, Technology and Nature in 2011 with distinction.
During his graduate-level training in the environmental sciences at the Universities of Potsdam (Germany) and Wageningen (The Netherlands), Niklas focused on quantitative methods like mechanistic modeling in hydrology and spatial statistics for the soil sciences. He has gained further experience in these areas during a traineeship at Alterra Research (Wageningen, The Netherlands) and as a junior researcher at the Leibnitz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) (Müncheberg, Germany). Niklas also has experience in field work in a wide range of environments, from Brazil's tropical rain forests to Siberian mountain tundra. In doing STS, Niklas returns his home disciplines, the environmental sciences, making them the empirical object of his research. Theoretically and politically, he takes much inspiration from feminist technoscience studies, as well as Foucauldian analyses of (modern, Western) ways of governing.
Currently, Niklas traces recent developments in the making of environmental knowledge and how it figures human-environment relations by way of an ethnography. Using participant observation, interviews and textual analysis, he focusses on the ways in which ecosystem services is becoming established as a core concept of ecological thinking which guides research as well as policy and management; and the profound effects this may have for the future of ecology and the environmental sciences. Through a case study, Niklas aims to understand what this socially and historically situated concept means for scientific knowledge-making and professional environmental management. Thereby, his research aims to complement the work of human geographers and environmental anthropologists who have addressed themselves to the task of documenting the wider social, political, cultural and not least ecological repercussions of environmental policies and management based on ecosystem services thinking. He also hopes, however, to be able to initiate a conversation between this kind of empirically-grounded analysis and ecological theory.
Niklas is based in the Environment Centre of Lancaster University, but also affiliated to the Centres for the Study of Environmental Change and Science Studies in Lancaster's Department of Sociology.
Niklas has served as board member of the Association for Geoecology (VGöD) from 2006 to 2008. He continues to contribute to the community as reviewer in the accreditation of undergraduate and graduate programmes in Germany.