Pr Florian Altermatt supervise a team of about 30 people, who address fundamental and applied questions in ecology, with a focus on spatial ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem processes. His work aims to understand how species occur in space and time, how they interact, and how processes such as species invasions, dispersal or global change affect natural communities.
He uses both experimental and comparative approaches, integrate novel tools such as eDNA, and parallel it with theoretical models. He uses a variety of study systems suited to address broad-ranging questions in ecology. This includes protists (microcosm-experiments), aquatic invertebrates (amphipods and freshwater insects), and Lepidoptera. 
His group is part of the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at University of Zurich and the Department of Aquatic Ecology at Eawag.