About us

LEMG working group in front of a tree.

Our team is interested in how land ecosystems, climate change and land-use change interact globally and regionally. We explore through a range of modelling approaches challenges and solutions to sustainable development arising from land system dynamics. We are based at the Campus Alpin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, located in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Southern Germany.

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Themes

Land-climate-interactions

How do land and climate interact? Climate is a chief co-determinant of vegetation cover and carbon, water and nutrient cycles. Climate change, including the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, therefore will cause biomes’ boundaries to shift, and impact biodiversity and numerous processes in terrestrial ecosystems.

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Ecosystem functional diversity and services

Life together with climate and other abiotic drivers is the basis to the state and functioning of the ecosystems. Although we do not fully understand the entirety of consequences of our doing, humanity is exploiting, in many places over-exploiting, ecosystems around the world: to gather resources, as space for human living, and for agriculture, forestry, and many other forms of use.

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Impacts and future of land use

Land provides the basis for our livelihoods – but the current extend of human influence, magnitude and rate of change of resource use is historically unprecedented and not sustainable. The way humans make use of terrestrial ecosystems clearly will have to improve, especially since changing climate and rising CO2 concentrations will become additional key factors, which affect growing conditions for crops, pastures, and forests.

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News

Agricultural landscape with tractor

New Study Sheds Light on Global N2O Emissions from Soil: LPJ-GUESS Model Gets an Upgrade

Our team members Jianyong, Almut, Peter, and Martin, along with other collaborators, have just published a new study in Geoscientific Model Development titled: “Soil nitrous oxide emissions from global land ecosystems and their drivers within the LPJ-GUESS model (v4.1)”. This work introduces a nitrification-denitrification module into the LPJ-GUESS land surface model, enhancing its ability to simulate emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O)—a potent greenhouse gas—from soils across the globe.

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Working on a laptop

Open position: Scientific programmer

You have knowledge about land ecosystems and advanced IT skills and a keen interest to apply these to help addressing societally and ecologically relevant research challenges? If that’s the case, we can offer you an interesting position.

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Almut and Jens after succesful defense

Congratulations, Jens!

Jens defended on April 28 successfully his Ph.D. thesis, entitled Ecosystem Feedback from Animal-Vegetation Interactions: A Modeling Approach. Congratulations!

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