Foto Landschaft

Research Groups

The work of our group is focussed on a) the description of the impact of land use and management changes on water and matter balance and ecosystem services as well as b) the identification and mitigation of trade-offs among land use, ecosystem services and biodiversity. In addition, we also tackle methodological questions in modelling and simulation such as quantification and specification of scale dependencies in process description, uncertainty in data and models as well as developing optimization tools to support landscape and environmental management strategies. Our toolset of models ranges from process-based to statistical and optimization algorithms.
Our research focuses on understanding, mapping and modeling spatio-temporal patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem services. It comprises conceptual work, applied case studies and the further development of methods. Collaboration across disciplines is of central importance for our research. We are concerned with a broad range of spatial scales, from the local (individuals, populations) to the national as well as continental/global level.
Community supported agriculture (CSA) and its potential for a transformation towards a sustainable, resilient and productive food system, is gaining increasing importance. Within a few years, the number of CSA farms has increased rapidly. However, the concept has so far received little attention in science and politics. The SAT-IRe working group is addressing this research gap and investigating the potential of CSA for the agricultural transformation.
AgriScape examines trade-offs that can arise during a transformation of the German agricultural system towards multifunctional agricultural landscapes. The research is based on an inter- and transdisciplinary approach combining ecological modelling and multi-criteria optimization with agent-based modelling and economic evaluation. Additionally, intensive stakeholder engagement plays an important role. The aim is to identify policy solutions that minimize these trade-offs and that are relevant for practice.