Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
Monday, July 15, 2019
Monday, July 15, 2019
In the 3rd party funded project GEOKUR we aim at investigating how modern data science methodologies can help developing tools that support analysis of impacts of global land use dynamics on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The project is coordinated by Prof. Ralf Seppelt (Computational Landscape Ecology department UFZ) in cooperation with Prof. Lars Bernard (TU Dresden’s Geoinformatics group), Dr. Carsten Meyer (head of iDiv’s Macroecology & Society group) and further international partners.
Geographer/ Landscape Ecologist / Data Scientist (f/m/x)
Subject: Ontologies and data provenance analysis to support interdisciplinary research and synthesis on land systems / land-use changes
To start at the earliest possible date.
Working time: 100% (39 hours per week), limited to 36 months
Your tasks:
Most global scale studies that assess biodiversity and ecosystem services (such as food or clean water) rely on land use, land cover and socio-economic data, which typically were produced originally for different purposes. Moreover, these data usually inherit considerable uncertainties and ambiguities. For example, a gridded land-use map may have been developed through a model that interpolated land-use patterns into areas without field observations, and the assumptions behind this model may constrain later applications without circular reasoning. A correct re-use of (big)-data, therefore, strongly depends on the availability and quality of associated meta-data that allow understanding the provenance of different data products, the consequences of data-aggregation with respect to correctness and consistency, and the avoidance of circular reasoning.
This post is specifically responsible for
developing interdisciplinary case studies revolving around impacts of global land use / land systems dynamics on biodiversity and food security that showcase the critical need for correctly re-using gridded data products when addressing land-system science questions
testing and validating prototypical IT tools developed within the GEOKUR team that support such correct re-use of data in the context of those case studies.