1.7 million € from an ERC Starting Grant

I was lucky to get one of the ERC grants in 2020, meaning that my work will be supported by 1,7 million euro. The work will focus on dryland trees in satellite images. Here is the abstract: Drylands cover approximately 65 million km² of the Earth’s land surface but their tree and shrub cover is …

Closed – PhD Fellow in Assessing Trees in African Drylands

The Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management in Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen is inviting applications for a PhD position in assessing tree cover in African drylands using very high resolution satellite imagery and deep learning. The position will start on October 1st 2020 or as soon as possible hereafter and …

Closed – Open PhD position

University of Copenhagen, Kayrros, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE), INRAE Bordeaux are looking for a PhD candidate who will be employed by LSCE and mainly based at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management (IGN) in Copenhagen, Denmark. PhD topic Dynamic forest carbon maps from very high resolution satellite data …

New study in Nature Communications

Land use policies have turned southern China into one of the most intensively managed forest regions in the world, with actions maximizing forest cover on soils with marginal agricultural potential while concurrently increasing livelihoods and mitigating climate change. Based on satellite observations, here we show that diverse land use changes in southern China have increased …

New paper in Nature Plants

We have a new paper online showing aboveground biomass carbon fluxes in the global tropics using the SMOS L-VOD data. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-019-0478-9

New papers on the impact of changed rainfall patterns on savanna vegetation

Climate change includes not only changed rainfall amounts, but also the distribution, intensity and frequency of heavy rainfall events changes. This leads to a a generally decreased relationship between annual rainfall and vegetation production. Also, herbaceous and woody vegetation benefit differently from changed rainfall patterns. We have now 2 new studies online, exploring how changed …

Why our research matters

At some point, many scientists working in geographic fields may have asked themselves if there is any "use" in the work we do. The main aim of a study should not be to get it published in a high impact journal but to share research results with as many people as possible. However, here comes …

New Publication in Nature Sustainability

Now this is something really cool: -We have a paper in the first ever issue of the new journal Nature Sustainability -Both the cover of the first issue and the website banner are my photos I shot last summer in Southern China -The paper is the thesis of my girlfriend and it is the cover …

How does conflict affect land use? New publication!

Population and Environment in the Middle East

In November 2015, me and a colleague (Michael Degerald, visit his blog here) asked the question: how is agriculture affected in the areas seized by the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Da’esh)? We couldn’t find much information to answer our question, so we decided to investigate it ourselves.

At first we wanted to look at changes in productivity indicated by satellite measured greenness, but later we decided to go a step deeper and look at land use activity as an indicator of land abandonment (as I had done in a previous publication). As the project moved on, more people became interested, and eventually three more co-authors were added: Petter Pilesjö (Lund University), Martin Brandt and Alexander Prishcepov (both from Copenhagen University).

Together, we conducted a land use classification based on NDVI data from MODIS based on the seasonality of the land surface. We distinguished between single cropped cropland…

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Expanding the study area: from West Africa to South China

People who know me and my research know that I am in love with the Sahel and its people, and this will never change. However, I recently had the chance to expand my research area from the semi-arid Sahel to humid China, more specifically the South China Karst. I spent around 4 months in China …