Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Pressemitteilungen

Due to globally increasing pressure on land several scientific debates emerged on reconciling food production and biodiversity conservation.

We see that production rates of food and renewable resources slowed down around 2006 and thus conclude that peak years of renewable resources appeared already. It is thus of utmost importance to develop provisioning of food and commodities while sustaining our life support system, i.e. maintain ecosystem functioning and conserve biodiversity. Though research is often limited to an antagonistic set of land use conditions that pit humans against nature and often adopt a dichotomous perspective and even more do not provide concepts for transferability of results.

Ralf Seppelt proposes a general framework and presents results that incorporate multiple aspects of land use on a global and regional scale ready to be used for managing the trade-offs between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation in the world’s diverse ecological and social contexts. Such a comprehensive understanding, synthesizing knowledge across a variety of global landscapes, is urgently needed as global trade of agricultural products makes externalizing of production easier than ever before and risks success in achieving recently enacted sustainable development goals.

Prof. Dr. Ralf Seppelt is mathematician and landscape ecologist and heads the Department for Computational Landscape Ecology at the UFZ Leipzig and holds a professorship at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His expertise and research interests lay in the field of land resources and ecosystem service management utilizing integrated simulation models and quantitative analysis tools. He is coordinating the scientific and synthesis project GLUES of the BMBF Program „Sustainable Land Management“ and spokesperson of the Helmholtz Research School ESCALATE (Ecosystem Services Under Changing Land-Use and Climate).