News
Welcome to our team, Prof. Uta Schirpke!
28 Oct 2025
Uta will lead our chair as acting professor over the coming year, collaborating with us on research and teaching.
With the start of the new semester, we’re excited to welcome Prof. Dr. Uta Schirpke as our Acting Professor! Uta will lead our chair over the coming year, collaborating with us on research and teaching.
Uta began her academic journey in Physical Geography right here at our department in Munich. After research stays with ETA Florence and the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing in Ottawa, she completed her PhD in 2013 and earned her habilitation in 2020 at the Institute of Ecology at the University of Innsbruck. Since 2006, she is also a researcher at the Institute for Alpine Environment at Eurac Research in Bolzano.
An expert in alpine landscape ecology and ecosystem services, Uta’s research focuses on understanding and managing the interactions between people and mountain ecosystems. She addresses questions such as: How do human activities like agriculture or tourism shape these ecosystems? And how do these ecosystems, in turn, contribute to human well-being?
Her work explores how ecosystem services extend far beyond local boundaries, what attracts people to the Alps for recreation, and how mountain environments cope with pressures from intensifying human use and climate change. To address these topics, she applies and combined GIS, spatial modelling and participatory approaches across multiple temporal and spatial scales.
Uta is currently leads the EVESNAT project which evaluates nature-based solutions in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem services to meet nature restauration targets of the European Union.
Within our research team, we tackle a broad range of topics: from hydrology, remote sensing, and ecology to modelling and machine learning. Uta brings a clear vision for the year ahead:
I want to bring the team’s approaches closer together. Next year’s goal is to identify synergies and jointly develop novel ideas.
By combining our diverse expertise, we’re ready to take our research to the next level!
Want to learn more about Uta’s research?
- Schirpke U & Ebner M (2025) Mapping spatio-temporal patterns of soundscapes in a mountain landscape
- Schirpke U, Ebner M & Tappeiner, U (2024) Effects of climate-related environmental changes on non-material benefits from human-nature interactions: A literature review
- Schirpke U et al. (2023) Emerging technologies for assessing ecosystem services: A synthesis of opportunities and challenges
Science in a sentence: What are ecosystem services?
All the benefits that nature provide to humans – from clean air, water, and fertile soil to less tangible values such as recreation, inspiration, and aesthetic experiences.