Physical Geography and Nexus Research

Welcome to the page of the chair for Physical Geography and Nexus Research!

We study the interactions between land, water, and atmosphere under global environmental change across space and time. Our research aims to understand and project how shifting climate conditions and land use changes affect natural ecosystems, vegetation growth, water availability, and food production.

We combine process-based Earth system modeling with remote sensing and machine learning across scales from field measurements to global land surface modeling. By bringing together modeled processes and real-world observations, we develop scalable algorithms that help quantify ecosystem and agricultural responses to global change pressures.

• Quantifying ecosystem, agricultural, and landscape responses to environmental and socio-economic change, including climate impacts, snow droughts and other hydrometeorological extremes, land-use changes and their consequences for productivity, water, and human well-being.
• Assessing water resource dynamics under climate change and human use, with a focus on trade-offs among agriculture, hydropower, and ecosystems.
• Advancing and regionalizing process-based models (e.g., LPJmL): model development, downscaling, observational data assimilation, hybrid approaches to improve robustness, accuracy and scalability.
• Integrating in-situ data with multi-scale remote sensing, from hyperspectral satellites (e.g., EnMAP, PRISMA) and field measurements in conjunction with laboratory analysis.
• Developing AI-driven applications for agriculture and yield forecasting.

Together, we bring geography, physics, and data science into dialogue to create a deeper, data-informed understanding of environmental processes and supporting sustainable development.