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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green

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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Sunset

News

Winners of the Effective Communicator Award at the ELLIS Summer School

Effective Communicator Award

Congratulations to our group member, Carolina Natel, who - together with her teammates - received the Effective Communicator Award at the ELLIS Summer School: AI for Earth and Climate Sciences for their project, “Self-supervised Learning for Flood Mapping.”

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LEMG group

Group retreat 2025

This year our group retreat took place in Bad Bayersoien. 
We discussed topics relevant to the group, like how we can improve communication and collaboration, data management, and the onboarding process. 
We also made time for other group activities, such as walks through the peatland and around Lake Soier.

 

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Green pine tree forest in the sunset

Machine Learning emulators accelerate forest carbon simulations in LPJ-GUESS by 95%

Team members Carolina, David, Peter, Almut, and collaborators published a new study in Geoscientific Model Development, presenting machine learning emulators that speed up predictions of forest carbon stocks and fluxes under climate change by 95%, while preserving the original model's sensitivity to key environmental drivers.

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