2024-10-03, 15:30–15:50, Theatre Hall (Conference Center Laxenburg)
The UN has declared this to be the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, which should foster the development of restoration projects in many parts of the world suffering from land degradation. In parallel, there is growing demand for deforestation-free and sustainably produced products, as reflected partly by the establishment of the new EU Regulation on Deforestation-free products. The combination of these trends will likely lead to local land use changes resulting in increases in landscape heterogeneity. Here we place an interest in the effects that such changes have on biophysical variables that directly impact the Earth system and the local climate, such as short-wave radiation, land surface temperature and evapotranspiration, as estimated diurnally from geostationary satellite observations. In this study, we explore how the tree density and tree spatial arrangement in different ecosystems of the African continent have an impact on the energetic budget at local and regional scales. We perform a space for time analysis where local changes on vegetation are used to disentangle the effect of land cover transitions on biophysical variables. We expect the results of the study to provide insights into where increasing landscape complexity may provide additional benefits in terms of ecosystem services and thereby contribute towards guidelines in sustainable land planning.
Open-Earth-Monitor Cyberinfrastructure (Grant agreement ID: 101059548)
Gregory Duveiller holds a PhD in agronomical science and biological engineering from the Université catholique of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. After his PhD, he spent 10 years working at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), in Ispra, Italy. He has specialized in developing methods to combine different satellite remote sensing data streams to better monitor and understand land processes, including crop yield monitoring, land cover change and land-atmosphere interactions. Since 2021 he is a project group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. His main research aims at improving our understanding of the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the Earth System by using data-driven yet process-based thinking applied to satellite Earth Observation data. A key focus is on exploring the complexity and diversity of terrestrial ecosystems, and how their specific functional properties affect land-atmosphere interactions.