PhD project offered by the IMPRS-gBGC in Jan 2026

Exploring the role of landscape diversity in modulating ecosystem resilience to extreme events

Gregory Duveiller , Christine Römermann , Markus Reichstein

Project description

Ecosystems within a landscape provide essential services to society, from food production to climate regulation and habitat provisioning. Historically, land management has often prioritized maximizing short-term productivity and minimize management costs, leading to more homogeneous landscapes with simplified land-use patterns. This homogenization has reduced biodiversity and ecological connectivity—factors that are increasingly recognized as key drivers of landscape-scale functioning¹. Growing evidence suggests that landscapes with higher ecological richness and structural diversity tend to be more productive, more resilient, and more stable across space and time². Thus, biodiversity loss can destabilize ecosystem functioning, particularly under climate extremes such as heatwaves and droughts^3,4. As the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events continue to rise, understanding how landscape heterogeneity influences ecosystem resilience becomes critical. Diverse landscapes may buffer climate impacts through a range of mechanisms—for example, by moderating land-surface temperature, altering evapotranspiration patterns, or influencing low-level cloud formation. Yet, despite these plausible mechanisms, we still lack a quantitative understanding of how spatial heterogeneity, landscape diversity and plant biodiversity interact with climate variability, and under which conditions they can mitigate (or potentially amplify) the effects of extreme events.

This PhD will explore novel approaches to tackle this problem by exploiting multiple sources of remote sensing imagery. On the one side, it will attempt to describe better landscape by tapping into high spatial resolution imagery, such as Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1, but also hyperspectral data, and possibly new satellite embedding such as those from AlphaEarth Foundations⁵. On the other hand, the PhD will explore geostationary remote sensing, technology long underexploited in terrestrial applications, to diagnose the variability of ecosystem properties such as land surface temperature at different time scales from diurnal to interannual, and feedback effects to the atmosphere such as low-level cloud formation. By establishing pair-wise comparison of analogue landscapes within similar climates but varying degrees of diversity, the PhD will aim to tease out the relationships between ecosystem diversity and function. By doing so at scale across a wide variety of landscapes, the PhD will further contribute to a better understanding of BEF relationships which generally are studied at local scale. In a second phase, these relationships will be explored during extreme events to quantify their potential buffering capacities. We hope this effort will contribute towards generating policy guidance to design future-proof landscapes as measures of adaptation to the changing climate.

Working group

The PhD candidate will be jointly supervised by Gregory Duveiller (Group Ecosystem Function from Earth Observation (EFEO)), Markus Reichstein (Director of Department of Biogeochemical Integration), and Christine Römermann (head of Plant Biodiversity group at FSU Jena and Director of the Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function (SIP) Jena).

Your profile

Applications to the IMPRS-gBGC are open to well-motivated and highly-qualified students from all countries. Prerequisites for this PhD project are:

either Master in Earth System Science, Earth Observation, Environmental Sciences, Ecology, Agronomy, Forestry, Geography or equivalent
programming experience in a modern computing language (R, Python, Julia)
experience in handling satellite remote sensing data
good knowledge and interest in ecosystem functioning and land-atmospheric interactions
good knowledge and interest in land use and (plant) biodiversity
interest in working in an interdisciplinary team
very good oral and written communication skills in English

The Max Planck Society (MPS) strives for gender equality and diversity. The MPS aims to increase the proportion of women in areas where they are underrepresented. Women are therefore explicitly encouraged to apply. We welcome applications from all fields. The MPS has set itself the goal of employing more severely disabled people. Applications from severely disabled persons are expressly encouraged.

References

Seppelt, R., Arndt, C., Beckmann, M., Martin, E. A. & Hertel, T. W. Deciphering the Biodiversity–Production Mutualism in the Global Food Security Debate. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 35, 1011–1020 (2020).
Oehri, J., Schmid, B., Schaepman-Strub, G. & Niklaus, P. A. Terrestrial land-cover type richness is positively linked to landscape-level functioning. Nat Commun 11, 154 (2020).
Mahecha, M. D. et al. Biodiversity and Climate Extremes: Known Interactions and Research Gaps. Earth’s Future 12, e2023EF003963 (2024).
Mahecha, M. D. et al. Biodiversity loss and climate extremes — study the feedbacks. Nature 612, 30-32 (2022).
Brown, C. F. et al. AlphaEarth Foundations: An embedding field model for accurate and efficient global mapping from sparse label data. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.22291 (2025).