Elisabeth Kalko

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Elisabeth Klara Viktoria Kalko (born 10 April 1962 in Berlin) is a German tropical scientist and ecologist working at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Ulm.

[edit] Life

Elisabeth Kalko is an ecologist with a first degree in biology from the Universität Tübingen in Germany, which was followed by a doctorate in 1991. The topic of her thesis was The ecolocation and hunting behaviour of three European dwarf bat species Pipistrellus pipistrellus (Schreber, 1774), Pipistrellus nathuslii (Keyserling et Blasius, 1839) and Pipistrellus kuhli (Kuhl, 1819), in the wild.

In 1999, Kalko was appointed staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. She spent considerable amounts of time on expeditions and at scientific institutions in the US such as the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in the Congo and many other countries. Since 2000, Kalko holds a joint appointment not only at STRI but also as director and professor at the Institute of Experimental Ecology at the University of Ulm in Germany, the town where Albert Einstein was born. Part of her scientific crew is one of the leading German entomologists, Heiko Bellmann.

Kalko is a member of the German National Committee on Global Change Research, editor-in-chief of the international tropical ecology journal Ecotropica. She is one of the most prominent experts alive in the areas of bat community ecology, echolocation and bat behaviour.

[edit] Research

Recent research conducted by Elisabeth Kalko has highlighted the importance of bats for maintenance of tropical forests and has revealed that ecolocation signal intensity has been a largely underestimated aspect in echolocation research (links below).