Prof. Dr. Ralf Seppelt studied applied mathematics at the Technical University Clausthal Zellerfeld, Germany, obtained his doctorate degree at the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany, in agroecology, systems analysis and philosophy where he worked as research assistant and lecturer at Institute for Geoecology. After several research visits at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, Burlington and Maryland, USA, as well at the CSIRO in Canberra, Australia, he was appointed full professor for applied landscape ecology at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he lectures courses on Environmental Modelling. He is head of the department for Computational Landscape Ecology. At UFZ he is responsible for the research topic Land use Options of the programme Terrestrial Environment of the Helmholtz-Association. In the BMBF programme on "Sustainable Land Management" he coordinates the synthesis project GLUES “Global Assessment of Land Use Dynamics on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Ecosystem Services”. His major research focus is land resources management based on integrated simulation and modelling systems. He thus is interested in the interactions and interrelationship of anthropheric and biospheric processes. This requires methodological developments in landscape ecology such as model integration, hybrid model systems and scales in space and time.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity , Land management systems, Land use and conflict
In this paper in One Earth the authors show that using deviations from a model of cropland extent in 1992 built on all available data improves models of recent (1992–2015) cropland expansion over and above using the best available existing data.
A new paper in Trends in Ecology & Evolution looks at how we can manage the resources of our planet in such a way that we produce enough healthy food without destroying our life-support system. A comprehensive analytical framework is provided that accounts for multitrophic biodiversity-production processes; bridges disciplinary boundaries between agronomy, agroecology, economics, and conservation science; and elucidates the strong interactions of ecosystem functioning with food security and malnutrition. A helpful animation is also available.
The way we use land is changing. The demand for farmland, food and energy seems insatiable, but land is a finite resource. “Sustainable Land Management”, the 7-year research programme, which ended in 2017, investigated the consequences of land use under global change and developed strategies for a sustainable use. Coordinated by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the programme synthesized and integrated results from 12 individual place-based projects located all around the world.
