A tribute to Professor Walter Traunspurger

With this tribute, we want to highlight Professor Walter Traunspurger's achievements and contributions to education and research in the fields of nematology and ecology. Walter started to teach in 1998 in the Department of Animal Ecology at Bielefeld University (Germany) and completed his tenure in September 2022, a milestone in his career for which he deserves appreciation, although he is surely going to stay as enthusiastic and busy for many years to come. Over his 30 years of an outstanding academic career, he has supervised 22 Ph.D., 49 M.Sc. and 139 B.Sc. students. He has published over 200 research articles in leading zoological, ecological and ecotoxicological journals. Walter is one of the few living nematologists capable of identifying free-living freshwater nematodes to species level. However, his expertise and research interests are much broader with his biota-inclusive and trans-disciplinary approaches. For his students and colleagues, he has been an inexhaustible source of idealism, knowledge and lively experiences. The book, Ecology of freshwater nematodes, edited by Walter in 2021, provides a good overview of his recent research topics. Here, by summarising and sharing his main scientific accomplishments in this article, we hope that his story will inspire the next generation of nematologists and ecologists to continue his legacy and explore the promising avenues of research that he opened up during his productive scientific career.