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

African savanne

Effects of large herbivores on savanna vegetation

Helena, Isabel, and Almut have published a new study in the journal Ecological Informatics titled Analysing the impact of large mammal herbivores on vegetation structure in Eastern African savannas combining high spatial resolution multispectral remote sensing data and field observations. The study explores the effect of large mammal herbivores on savanna vegetation using various measures of satellite images and collected field data.

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Aerial view of different agriculturual land uses

Biochemical and biophysical effects of land cover change (LCC)

Almut and former team members published the study "Non-radiative effects dominate the local surface temperature response to land-cover change - Insights from a semi-empirical model" in the Journal of Environmental Management. It presents a simplified approach developed by Benjamin and Lorenz to examine how changes in land cover, such as deforestation and afforestation, impact local surface temperatures. ​

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View over peatland and lake

Global Carbon Budget 2024

This year's update of the global carbon budget is published (https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-965-2025). We contributed again with LPJ-GUESS to this annual international exercise that quantifies the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. The paper describes and synthesizes the datasets and methodologies applied, and their uncertainties.

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