The Earth System Data Science (ESDS) group embraces a wide array of highly relevant research questions via data-driven research. Example questions from our researchers are:

• How do ecosystem functions respond to climate extremes?
• Which changes in societal and environmental pre-conditions trigger societal vulnerability to environmental hazards and what are the feedbacks?
• How can we quantify nonlinear interactions in coupled Earth system dynamics?
• What do novel citizen science data tell us about macroecological processes?

We assume that long-term observations encode the necessary knowledge to answer these questions in the different domains of the coupled Earth system and human activity. Hence, we mainly focus on developing methods to extract the valuable information in these data in order to confront them with models, and gain new insights.

Team

Our team is highly interdisciplinary and culturally diverse, currently with researchers from Las Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe:

• Miguel D. Mahecha, PI
• Angelika Brachmann, administrative support
• Ida Flik, research fellow in NFDI4Earth
• Veronika Grupp, scientific coordination in the NFDI4Earth project
• Sarah Habershon, research assistant in the COCAP project
• Chaonan Ji, postdoctoral fellow in the Deep Extremes project
• Guido Kraemer, postdoctoral associate
• Francesco Martinuzzi, PhD candidate funded via Scads.AI
• Milena Mönks, scientific project coordination
• David Montero, PhD candidate in the Digital Forest project
• Karin Mora, postdoctoral fellow in the Breathing Nature initiative
• Kolja Nenoff, postdoctoral fellow in the COCAP project
• Martin Reinhardt, postdoctoral fellow funded via ML4Earth
• Kim Schmidt, PhD candidate funded via UFZ MoDEV
• Maximilian Söchting, PhD candidate in NFDI4Earth
• Daria Svidzinska, guest researcher funded via Volkswagen Stiftung
• Khalil Teber, PhD candidate in the XAIDA project
• René Voigt, technical support
• Sebastian Wienke, postdoctoral associate
• Sophie Wolf, scientist in the NFDI4Biodiversity project

Teaching

Teaching fundamentals of Earth system sciences as well as advanced methods is also one of our key missions. All course materials available only via moodle.