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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Sunset

News

Almut Arneth reading a book in the library

Highly Cited Researcher

Almut and two other researchers from KIT are among the most cited researchers worlwide.
Read more here (in German).

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Sponsorship Award Board together with Anita Bayer

VFF-IFU Sponsorship Award 2024

Congratulations! The VFF-IFU Sponsorship Award 2024, announced by the Presidential Board and the Evaluation Committee of VFF-IFU e.V. ('Friends of IFU') goes to Anita Bayer, Sven Lauterbach and Almut Arneth for their publication about benefits and trade-offs of optimized global land use.

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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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