Senior researcher
Physical Geography and Earth System Interactions
Land-use change, Global carbon cycle, Co-organizer of department colloquium
Office address:
Luisenstraße 37
Room A 203
80333 Munich
Office hours:
Please schedule an appointment via email.
I am a physicist and climate scientist. My research focuses on investigating how human land use, such as croplands, pastures, and wood harvest, affects the global carbon cycle. Additionally, I investigate the effects of climate change on human heat stress, both globally and in urban environments.
Global carbon cycle
The newest assessment of the global carbon cycle from the Global Carbon Project can be found in the Global Carbon Budget 2025, for which I coordinated the component on CO2 emissions from land-use change.
In an article published in the journal One Earth I investigated how emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry estimated by different datasets can be reconciled at the country-level (Schwingshackl et al., 2022). The article shows that the reconciliation is generally successful for various countries, and identifies potential reasons for remaining differences. I also contributed to a related study focusing on global estimates (Grassi et al., 2023).
Land use and land-use change
In a shared first-authored perspective in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, my colleague Wolfgang Obermeier and I investigated uncertainties and differences in CO2 fluxes from land-use change, and we identified promising improvements to lower uncertainties and make different estimates better comparable.
This blog post on Carbon Brief summarizes and discusses CO2 emissions from land-use change in six countries/regions with large emissions. It gives a comprehensible overview on the drivers of CO2 emissions from land-use change.
Heat stress
Urban areas are hotspots of heat stress due to the high population density in cities and the urban heat island effect. To analyze the future development of heat stress in European cities under climate change we used high-resolution simulations from regional climate models (EURO-CORDEX) and calculated different day-time and night-time heat indicators (Schwingshackl et al., 2024).
A group of bachelor students that I supervised in the project seminar Heat stress in cities developed a method that can be used to monitor the effectiveness of measures to mitigate urban heat islands based on Landsat satellite data. They published the results using the city of Stuttgart as a case study (Seeberg et al., 2022).
My publication list can be found on Google Scholar
06/2025 - 06/2025
Great excursion: Norway
10/2024 - 02/2025
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
05/2024 - 05/2024
Great excursion: Hamburg & Norway
10/2023 - 02/2024
Project seminar: Comparison of greenhouse gas emissions in several countries
10/2023 - 02/2024
Seminar: Climate change and climate impacts
07/2023 - 07/2023
Class excursion: Meteorological observatory at Hohenpeißenberg & Peißenberg mining museum
04/2023 - 07/2023
Exercise: Analysis of spatial and temporal data
10/2022 - 02/2023
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
10/2022 - 02/2023
Seminar: Climate change and climate impacts
04/2022 - 07/2022
Exercise: Analysis of spatial and temporal data
10/2021 - 02/2022
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
04/2021 - 07/2021
Exercise: Analysis of spatial and temporal data
02/2021 - 03/2021
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
Co-organizer of department colloquium Earth Futures