Postdoc researcher: Mapping global land-use patterns and recent historical changes

The German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) is a DFG National Research Centre located in Leipzig and jointly hosted by the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (FSU), the Leipzig University (UL) and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). Its central mission is to promote theory-driven synthesis and data-driven theory in the emerging field of Biodiversity Science. The concept of iDiv encompasses the detection of biodiversity, understanding its emergence, exploring its consequences for ecosystem functions and services, and developing strategies to safeguard biodiversity under global change.

Detailed information on global land use patterns and dynamics is crucial for biodiversity, climate, food security, and many other research fields. With the emergence of new remotely-sensed data, there are new opportunities for mapping multiple land-use dimensions as mutually consistent time-series. To develop land-use datasets using cutting-edge methodologies in a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative environment, we offer an exciting two-year Postdoc position at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv). The project is supervised by Dr. Carsten Meyer (head of iDiv Macroecology & Society group), Dr. Isabel Rosa (iDiv Biodiversity Conservation group), and Prof. Ralf Seppelt (head of UFZ department for Computational Landscape Ecology).

Job description:

• developing spatiotemporal analysis and modelling routines to create annual global time-series of land-use variables for a broad range of thematic variables pertaining to the extent, intensity, and management type of the three dominant classes of human land-use (cropping, grazing, and forestry)
• integrating, harmonizing, and further advancing routines for downscaling and interpolating reported land-use statistics via state-of-the- art remotely-sensed covariate layers (e.g. land cover)
• leading the development of open science and collaborative IT solutions as part of longer-lasting tools for global land-use analysis
• leading the dissemination of project results via journal publications, conference presentations, media presentations, etc.
• contributing to the management of the collaborative project (co-organization of project meetings, etc.)

Requirements/expected profile:

• successfully completed PhD in a project-related field, and a solid (geo)informatics-related education at some point in your career
• high motivation and skills to develop efficient solutions for large data processing tasks
• prior experience in command-line based geo-computation, open source programming languages (ideally in a Linux environment), and version control (e.g. Git) is expected
• proactive, team-oriented and having strong communication and written skills in English