Innovation

Our research programme involves the following innovative steps:

• Soil-plant-atmosphere interactions will be studied using a combination of methods from different disciplines including six eddy covariance towers, two regional soil water networks, and two scanning lidar systems.
• Based on detailed comparisons of observations and dedicated model runs, the parameterisation of exchange processes in regional simulation packages will be improved.
• Model performance will be enhanced by integrating crop models with land surface models. Hence, an optimisation of the simulation of processes at the regional scale will be achieved.
• Setting-up a high-resolution atmospheric model coupled with an advanced land surface model will lead to an improved representation of convection, clouds and precipitation.
• Methodologies coming from natural sciences will be linked to approaches from socio-economic sciences. Atmosphere-land surface, crop models and multi-agent systems will be coupled to capture the adaptation of land users and the feedbacks between land use decisions and atmosphere-land surface processes, forming a novel land system model.
• Coupling of software components within this model system will allow for projections and scenario analyses of the effects of and adaptation to climate change at different levels and scales, ranging from individual actors over farm households to watersheds and the landscape as a whole.
• The Research Unit will link the subject of “global climate change” to a multitude of functions in agricultural landscapes (multifunctionality) on a regional scale which sets the project apart from other interdisciplinary projects which have only addressed single landscape functions like water balance, biodiversity or land use.