Christoph Randler

University of Tübingen | EKU Tübingen · Department of Biology

Field trips provide real-world learning opportunities in biology education as they promote knowledge about nature among other things. As biodiversity is declining knowledge of species is important for understanding and appreciating the natural world and its implications. Many field guides are digitally available, but differences from traditional bo...

Background The worldwide ecological crisis, including global climate change, is leading to increased awareness and attitudes towards environmental problems. To address these problems, studies of human attitudes are needed. This study is based on the 2-Major Environmental Values (2-MEV) model, which measures two components of environmental attitudes...

Many studies have reported poor school achievement in evening persons and general circadian fluctuations in cognition. The aim of this study was to analyze circadian fluctuations in a cross-sectional design and examine the effects of chronotype on situational emotions and intrinsic motivation. A cross-sectional survey study was conducted in three T...

Willingness to donate and to protect (WTP) is an important part of worldwide nature conservation, and animals can be used as flagships for establishing conservation measures and collecting donations. We here focus on 141 German bird species to address factors that impact WTP by using a survey on the individual respondent level. Further, another ana...

Summary. A kite Milvus sp. with some features of the extinct Cape Verde Kite Milvus milvus fasciicauda, which was observed at Lacacão Sewage Pond on Boavista, Cape Verde, on 13 August 2023, may have been this taxon or a Red M. milvus × Black Kite M. migrans hybrid.

Chronopsychological research typically applied the morningness-eveningness dimension , resulting in a distinction between morning, intermediate, and evening chrono-types. However, in recent years, new measures have been developed that transcend the traditional "morning larks" vs. "night owls" dichotomy and better capture the complexity of individua...

The decline of Earth's biodiversity highlights the crucial role of knowledge about species in understanding ecological interdependencies and supporting conservation efforts. This study assessed bird species identification skills among 1752 students (46.4% boys, 51.9% girls, 1.1% diverse) in grades 4-12 from different school types, focusing on 30 sp...

While the association between sleep-related variables and academic achievement is widely acknowledged , limited attention has been directed towards exploring non-cognitive predictors of academic achievement such as conscientiousness and self-regulation. In this study, we investigated the relationships between various sleep-related factors (circadia...

Birding as a non-consumptive, nature-related outdoor activity is becoming increasingly popular. Here, using an online survey of Australian birders, we focussed on birding as a construct of recreation specialization and considered three aspects: perceived level of skill/knowledge, behaviour, and involvement. We analysed demographic effects (age, deg...

This study aimed to investigate the synchrony/asynhrony effect on eyewitness memory. Forty-four participants (24 evening-types and 20 morning-types) performed, individually, two online sessions: one in the morning and another in the evening. In each session, each participant visualized two videos (crime and neutral scenes), answered questions relat...

Bird identification is a necessary skill for citizen science projects, and teaching and learning about species is essential to halt the decline in biodiversity. Here, we investigated bird species knowledge in a case study of Michigan high school students using an online survey. Participants were asked to identify 21 common species, covering a wide...

Camera traps are a powerful tool to monitor the activity pattern of species over long time periods. Camera data can be used to analyze activity patterns of or temporal niche partitioning among species. Temporal niche partitioning plays an important role for species coexistence and is under constant evolutionary pressure from predator-prey relations...

Many bird species defend their territories against conspecifics during the breeding season. Although some temperate species have been observed to defend territories outside of the breeding season, such cases are rarely noted in the literature, and it remains largely unknown which environmental factors influence such behaviour. In this study, we inv...

Human dimensions of birds are becoming increasingly popular. One aspect is charismatic species and their impact on nature conservation, and the other is the positive impact of birds on human well-being. Studies exploring these relationships are mostly based on species richness, but specific species traits are usually not studied. Here, we propose t...

Personality traits and recreation specialization are related to an individual’s satisfaction with life. In addition, previous research has identified relationships between personality traits and recreational specialization. However, little is known about the interrelationship of the two variables in relation to life satisfaction. In this study, we...

Travelling to special places to observe birds is becoming an important niche in ecotourism. Here, we addressed differences between birdwatchers and non-birders to gain insight into the different needs (satisfaction, psychological restoration, and place attachment) at the same locality and during the identical time period at eight birdwatching sites...

Camera traps are increasingly used to estimate the density of animals as well as their activity patterns. As camera traps allow monitoring of animals over long periods of time without disturbance, they are especially useful to observe changes in diurnal activity patterns over time. In ornithology, camera trapping is still in its infancy. To our kno...

The loss of Earth’s biodiversity is accompanied by a loss of public knowledge about species. Many scientists are convinced that knowledge about species is an important prerequisite to interest and investment in species conservation. In the past, knowledge about species has mostly been assessed using birds, but there is no consensus on which birds c...

Birdwatchers contribute an immense amount of data to citizen science databases. Thus, birding is important from the leisure perspective and from nature conservation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we studied birdwatchers on a global scale in over 50 countries by applying the model of behavior change, which focuses on changes in opportunity (spatial,...

Occupational stress and burnout are widely encountered among many healthcare professionals, including nurses and doctors, as well as among members of other professions. For example, nurses, who have disrupted circadian rhythms, are seen to have sleep problems. In addition, their personality traits are also considered to be related with burnout. Thi...

Background and objective This study aimed to evaluate the sleep patterns of students and employees working onsite versus those working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic using actigraphy. Methods A total of 75 students/employees (onsite: N = 40, home-office: N = 35; age range: 19–56 years; 32% male; 42.7% students, 49.3% employees) were studie...

Urban and suburban green and blue spaces are important places for human recreation, and the impact of biodiversity on psychological and recalled restoration has received much attention. This study addresses the relationship between bird species richness and restoration in a controlled field experiment (guided bird walk) applying a battery of indivi...

Morningness-eveningness refers to individual differences in the sleep-wake cycle. Research indicates that morningness-eveningness is associated with the Big Five (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness) and the Big Two (alpha-stability, beta-plasticity) personality factors. However, the latter has not ye...

Here we examined the possibility of a relationship of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) with chronotype in a German-speaking sample of N = 1807 (1008 female, 799 male) with a mean age of 47.75 ± 14.41 y (range: 18-97 y). The data were collected using an anonymous online questionnaire (Chronotype: one item of the Morning-Evening-Questionnaire, as...

All over the world, educational science outreach programs in which students can perform laboratory work have been developed. A common goal of these programs is to counteract students' decreasing motivation in STEM education. In Germany, several outreach science labs have been established over the last 20 years. It is assumed that the characteristic...

Studies about charismatic bird species have been carried out using the general public; among the most common charismatic attributes are body mass and coloration. However, research on birders as a target population is lacking. Birders are people who identify bird species based on visual or acoustic cues. It is important to study this group directly...

Scientists and conservationists suggest species knowledge as a possible starting point when it comes to creating deeper knowledge and awareness of nature, the environment, and biodiversity. The aim of this work was to analyze secondary school students’ species knowledge of vertebrates and invertebrates. This is one of the first studies that also dr...

Recreation specialization postulates that people progress through a career when engaging in a leisure activity. This has been studied by cross-sectional and few panel studies, but both methods have some shortcomings. Here, I studied German birdwatchers from the 16 federal states of Germany by employing the propensity score matching method. Data wer...

Weather importantly affects leisure, especially outdoor activities, like birding, which can be recognized as serious leisure. Outdoor attractive and feasible activities throughout the year, also in adverse weather conditions, are extremely sought after by therapists and leisure organizers. Then, we asked 388 Polish birders how their activity was re...

Recreationists differ in their engagement, specialization and involvement in their leisure activity. Recreation specialization can be seen as a continuum from the novice to the highly advanced (or as a career process), sometimes grouped into three or four categories. Within the highest category of advanced recreationists, a specific hard-core, elit...

Introduction Birding has become a widespread, nature-related outdoor leisure activity. However, birding motivation has received little attention in research on this leisure activity so far. Since previous work showed some inconsistencies that are based on different measurements and concepts, the current study aimed at unifying and broadening the co...

Studies about biodiversity and well-being used different approaches to assess biodiversity, e.g., scientific counts and censuses or perceived biodiversity estimated by the respondents. Here, we assessed whether laypeople could estimate the breeding bird diversity or species richness at specific places. For comparison, we carried out bird censuses w...

Birding specialization can be measured alongside a continuum from the beginner to the specialist. The structure of birding specialization has three dimensions: (1) skill/knowledge, (2) behavior, and (3) psychological commitment. We tested the factorial structure and factorial invariance of the birding specialization scale in traditional and simplif...

Citizen Science (CS) projects are an important aspect of scientific data collection and biodiversity conservation. In ornithology, various CS projects exist, and even laypersons can contribute, but advanced birdwatchers also spend considerable time and effort in data collection. Here, different CS projects for birders were analyzed and compared wit...

Many species of birds use alarm calls to signal information about predators, including the level of threat. Previous playback experiments suggest that the urgency response towards heterospecific calls is phylogenetically conserved, notably in the Paridae family. Using playback experiments conducted on European great tits (Parus major), we tested wh...

Vertebrate alarm calls can signal danger, and often encode information about predator proximity. Some species of birds alter the number of notes of their alarm calls to reflect urgency, with high‐urgency alarm calls having more notes than low‐urgency calls. Not only do individuals perceive the urgency message encoded in the alarm calls of conspecif...

In this study, we sought to explore the association between sleep/wake habits and the Dark Triad (DT) traits. The sample consisted of 637 university students who filled out the measures of the Dark Triad, sleep quality, daytime sleepiness, and sleep timing. There was a positive relationship between the Dark Triad composite and eveningness, and a ne...

Social aspects of birding have been rarely studied and birders are not a homogenous group. Different subcultures have been identified and addressed by the concepts of ‘birding specialization’ and ‘birding motivations’. We investigated social aspects of birding in combination with demographic variables and a special focus on a Big Day (aka birdathon...

Numerous studies have shown a positive impact of nature on psychological restoration and on well-being, which, in turn, are related to life satisfaction. Previous studies were place based or episode assessments, usually in the field. Here, we studied bird-watchers at different levels of their recreational specialization, especially the factor commi...

Citizen Science projects are continuously growing in popularity as they offer a unique possibility to conduct large-scale research projects as well as allow citizens to broaden their knowledge about the research topic or the process of scientific investigations. However, the benefits for participants vary, depending on the way and the amount of par...

Background: This study addresses the effects of the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID- 19) restriction measures on sleep and bedtime habits of N= 637 German university students. Methods: The questionnaire was distributed online during two different time periods in 2020 (February 27–March 21) and in 2021 (February 27–March 27). The first data collection...

Heterospecifics eavesdrop on mobbing calls and respond with appropriate behavior, but the functional aspects are less studied. Here, I studied whether jays (Garrulus glandarius) eavesdrop on blackbird (Turdus merula) mobbing calls in comparison to blackbird song. Furthermore, it was studied whether jays provided with extra information about predato...

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Summary There are only a few validated chronotype and morningness-e...

Birdwatching is an increasing nature-related activity, with an important influence on data collection of citizen science programs. Initial involvement into a leisure activity is an important life event, but also of interest for nature conservation and citizen science projects. Here, we assessed the initiation into birding by an open-ended question....

Human-nature relationships are an important aspect of leisure research. Previous studies also reported that nature-related activities have a health benefit. In this study, we surveyed US-American birdwatchers at two time points during the COVID pandemic (independent samples). During the beginning of the COVID pandemic in spring 2020, we analyzed th...

Problem-solving and critical thinking are associated with 21st century skills and have gained popularity as computational thinking skills in recent decades. Having such skills has become a must for all ages/grade levels. This study was conducted to examine the effects of grade level, gender, chronotype, and time on computational thinking skills. To...

Birds underlie a predation-starvation risk, and foraging should show a diurnal/circadian pattern. Camera traps were used to study visitation patterns and discovery of a novel food source in woodland birds in SW Germany. A total of 18 species occurred at feeders with nine of them being exploratory species. Great Tits ( Parus major ) discovered novel...

Neben eher fachunabhängigen Emotionen (z. B. Langeweile, Wohlbefinden) treten bestimmte Emotionen wie Angst und Ekel im Biologieunterricht stär-ker als in anderen Unterrichtsfächern auf. In diesem Beitrag werden beide Ty-pen von Emotionen in den Blick genommen. Situationale Angst korreliert da-bei in verschiedenen unterrichtlichen Settings negativ...

Integrating multiple representations into a coherent mental model is one of the challenges when learning with multimedia. In this experimental study (N=173), we examined how highlighting corresponding information in text-graph learning material can help higher education students to make the necessary connections and improve learning outcomes in two...

Studying wildlife-oriented motivations is important for park design, citizen science projects, and avitourism. In previous work, motivations were modeled as social, achievement, and appreciation oriented components of wildlife-related motivations. The aims of this study were to test the components of this model with birdwatchers and to study any va...

Here, we researched the effects of the COVID-19 restriction measures on learning/work-related characteristics (working hours, creativity in problem-solving approaches/organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)) depending on chronotype of N = 681 German residents (mean age: 28.63 years, SD: 10.49 years). The data were collected with an online questio...

Citizen Science (CS) is a megatrend of the 21st century given its importance for nature conservation. CS projects dealing with birds often require knowledge and abilities to identify species. This knowledge is not easy to acquire and people often learn from leaders during field trips and lectures about birds. This emphasizes the need for leaders in...

Morningness-eveningness (M/E) is an important variable in individual differences and has an impact on many areas of life including general and mental health. In previous work eveningness has shown to correlate to personality disorders (PDs) and mental instability such as psychoticism, depression, and bipolar disorders. Therefore, a relationship bet...

Against the backdrop of preparing students for a digitalized future, supporting pre-service teachers' development of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) has become paramount in pre-service teacher education. Whether and how pre-service teachers' acquisition of TPACK could be supported is still an open question, as previous research...

The purpose of this study was to segment birdwatchers into clusters. Members from a wide range of bird related organizations, from highly specialized birders as well as Facebook bird group members were studied to provide a diverse dataset (n = 2766; 50.5% men). Birding specialization was measured with a battery of questionnaires. Birding specializa...

Monitoring of small nocturnal and arboreal rodents is difficult and often conducted using indirect techniques. Here, we measured the circadian activity of the fat dormouse (Glis glis) directly using camera traps. The study took place at the Spitzberg in SW Germany. Data were collected using six Bushnell Natureview cameras with a macro lens at baite...

Climate change and its consequences have called for actions to mitigate it, triggering society to act and speak out about sustainability policies. Movements like Fridays for Future (FFF) spread beyond the young people pressed for action to combat climate change. The present study aimed to (1) assess the environmental attitudes (EA) and knowledge (E...

During the COVID-19 shutdown phase in Germany, universities stopped presence teaching and students had to turn to digital instruction. To examine their capability to cope with the changed learning situation, we assessed how basic psychological need satisfaction and frustration, motivational regulation, vitality, and self-efficacy of 228 German biol...

Animal Welfare Attitudes (AWA) can be defined as the attitudes of humans towards the welfare of animals. Although AWA has been previously associated with demographic factors as gender, one of the main limitations is that few studies applied robust psychometric questionnaire scales. Moreover, some evidence of cross-cultural variations in AWA have bee...

Morningness-Eveningness Stability Scale improved (MESSi) is an assessment tool that evaluates distinctness of daily changes as well as the person's propensity for morningness and eveningness. The aim of this study is to evaluate psychometric properties of the Turkish version of MESSi and associations of chronotypes and diurnal variations with perso...

Purpose Insufficient nocturnal sleep is a primary source of excessive daytime sleepiness. Most previous research has focused on the disparity between sleep demands and study start times in adolescents. Fewer studies have focused on elementary schoolchildren. We hypothesize that late sleep timing is connected to excessive daytime sleepiness in a sam...

Biodiversity is declining, and knowledge about biodiversity declines in a similar way. Previous studies have already addressed predictors of species knowledge. Here, we studied bird species knowledge related to demographics, but also to individual differences in affinity to nature, by including (i) birding specialization and (ii) bird-related activ...

Birdwatching (birding) is a nature-based recreational activity, often including arising early in the morning. In the present study, we tested the effect of a negative social jetlag (SJL) in birders. Negative SJL implies that people have an even earlier sleep-wake rhythm on free days or weekends. As birds' activities start before or shortly after su...

Citizen Science (CS) projects are important for scientific research and for biodiversity conservation. In ornithology, citizen scientists make important contributions to biological conservation, because they have a highly developed knowledge about birds, making their data more valuable than those from lay persons. However, to make the data even mor...

Concerns about animal welfare are becoming increasingly important. Recent research suggests that age and gender are associated with attitudes toward animal welfare in adolescents. In this study, we analyzed attitudes toward animal welfare in adolescents from five geographic regions: Colombia, France, Germany, and two regions in India (Raipur and Ka...

Vertebrate species knowledge, a key factor for conserving biodiversity, is a compulsory part of school curricula. This study evaluated the vertebrate species knowledge of sixth-grade German grammar school pupils (aged 11-13) to investigate the influence of socio-demographic factors (gender, size of hometown, mother tongue), personal expectations (f...

Numerical competence—the ability to estimate and process the number of objects and events—is important during antipredator strategies because it influences individual's survival chances. Animals can benefit from numerical competence during mobbing—when a prey moves toward and vocalizes at or harasses a predator. Mobbing responses of some species ar...

Numerical competence—the ability to represent, discriminate, and process numerical quantity information—is a widespread cognitive ability in animals that influences survival and reproductive success. Little is known about the role of numerical competence during predator mobbing—when a prey moves toward and harasses a predator. Since being in a larg...

In birds, aggressive behavior can be elicited in the field with a simulated territory intrusion (STI). Here, we compared four different STI methods in nuthatches in the non-breeding season: playback only, playback combined with an inactive wooden model mounted on a robot device, playback and an active model mounted on a robot device, and playback w...

Simple Summary: Camera traps are now widely used in animal research because they can monitor animals continuously. Nocturnal mammals are particularly difficult to monitor, and identification without cameras would be difficult. However, camera traps can be improved. We here compared two experimental settings to increase detection and images taken of...

Background and objective In this study, we researched the effects of the COVID-19 restriction measures on the sleep health of N = 681 German residents (mean age: 28.63 years, SD: 10.49 years). Methods The data were collected with an anonymous online survey composed of validated questionnaires and additional questions to quantify changed circumstan...

Umfassende Orientierungshilfe für Praxis und Studium. 9. Auflage, völlig neu bearbeitet, 12., durchgesehene Auflage 2020).

The new corona virus infection SARS-CoV2 which was later renamed COVID-19 is a pandemic affecting public health. The fear and the constraints imposed to control the pandemic may correspondingly influence leisure activities, such as birding, which is the practice of observing birds based on visual and acoustic cues. Birders are people who carry out...

Students' intrinsic motivation has a crucial role in their learning. In this context, the intrinsic motivations of students should be taken into consideration in educational activities. In this contribution, the scale developed by Wilde et al. (2009) was adapted to Turkish Culture. This is an intrinsic motivation scale, which is an adapted, time-ec...

Chronotype influences the success of mate choice. Evening types reproducibly report higher mating success than morning types. In this study, we directly assessed the reasons for these advantages, hypothesizing the degree of choosiness a person has concerning mate choice being causal. A total of N = 1247 (male = 440/female = 807) heterosexuals parti...