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

Group photo of the Naturance General Assembly at KIT-Campus Alpin

Naturance General Assembly

On October 8-9, our institute hosted the annual General Assembly of the Naturance project.  The assembly gathered together representatives from all partner organizations to present updates on ongoing activities and discuss the next steps for the project.

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Photovoltaic in the landscape

Potential of advanced photovoltaic technologies

We contributed to an analysis led by colleagues from the Land-use change and climate team on how advanced photovoltaic technologies could counteract the reducing effects of changes in solar radiation and rising temperatures on the global solar photovoltaic potential.

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Anna and Matt with the LPJ-GUESS Distinguished User Award

LPJ-GUESS “Distinguished User Award”

Congratulations! Anna won, jointly with her team-mate Matt from our Frankfurt colleagues, the LPJ-GUESS “Distinguished User Award” at the LPJ-GUESS community meeting.

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