Landscapes of the Future -
Securing Terrestrial Ecosystems
and Freshwater Resources
under Natural Dynamics
and Global Change

Expansion and intensification of agriculture and forestry, urban sprawl, and climate change are the major drivers that influence biodiversity, soils, and ecosystems. The focal question is how ecosystem functions and terrestrial biodiversity can sustainably be maintained or even restored. Developing scenarios and pictures of the future that address this focal question requires expanding our current knowledge of global change to include interactions between biotic and abiotic processes and socio-ecological feedbacks, and requires explicit consideration of non-linearities in trends of ecosystem states and functions across different spatial and temporal scales. We fill empirical knowledge gaps with experiments,  observations, and distributed networks across regional and global scales, and incorporate novel technologies to improve the precision and efficiency of this research. We aim to deliver actionable, policy-relevant knowledge, including landscape management tools for decision-makers and stakeholders and biodiversity action plans (e.g., for pollinators), thus for halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity and degradation of soils.

Spokesperson: Ingolf Kühn (UFZ)
Deputies: Ralf Seppelt (UFZ)

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Water is a fundamental resource for multiple human demands, such as drinking water supply, food production, and energy provision. Pressures and impacts are causing water quantity, water quality, and aquatic biodiversity to deteriorate, and hydrological extremes are impacting many regions of the world. The expected expansion of urban areas and agricultural intensification will further alter regional water cycles, and all these dynamics will be accompanied by regionally varying climate change patterns. At the same time, policies at national, European, and global levels will likely drive increased resource and interlinked water consumption. Efforts to achieve water security can only be effective if an integrated hydrological, ecological and socio-economic approach is taken that addresses the whole water cycle, and critical trade-offs between the competing human water use and ecosystem demands, in solution-oriented ways. Historical, current, and future basin trajectories of water quantity, quality, and aquatic ecosystem functioning under global and climate change will be determined based on a mechanistic and quantitative understanding of the underlying processes. This approach is unique as it will cover entire water cycles from regional to global scales, a wide variety of hydro-ecological settings and a wide spectrum of societal and government types. It will thus decipher the role of water for securing multiple landscape functions.

Spokesperson: Dietrich Borchardt (UFZ)
Deputy: Bruno Merz (GFZ)

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Developing strategies to foster multifunctional landscapes requires a deep understanding of the processes in the lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere that shape the Earth’s terrestrial surface, and their links with atmospheric processes. Knowing what determines the stability of the Earth’s surface system, and what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for important system change to occur, is essential. Some terrestrial surface systems are robust and stable in the face of strong climatic pressures, while others, such as permafrost systems, are sensitive to minor external changes. Our research will explore and constrain the mechanisms of links and feedbacks between climate, tectonics, landscapes, and biota, with a strong emphasis on the sensitivity of terrestrial surface systems to climate change. It will combine both monitoring and modeling of Earth surface processes and climate interactions on time scales from process events to major secular and cyclic trends on geological time scales, and reconstruction of past processes recorded in deep time archives. This will help anticipate the impacts of future global and climate change and reduce uncertainties. Crucially, we will distinguish, where possible, the changes driven by human activity from those inherent to Earth’s natural system behavior, to help the research objective of T5; namely, to identify effective leverage points for the optimization of multifunctional landscapes.

Spokesperson: Dirk Sachse (GFZ)
Deputy: Ulrike Herzschuh (AWI)

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High-resolution climate model projections indicate that extreme weather events will occur more frequently. Summer droughts such as in Germany in 2018, for example, will be the rule rather than the exception and will affect terrestrial ecosystems, water bodies, and urban areas. Robust Earth system models are needed to draw realistic pictures of the future, including weather extremes, and hence enable detailed multi-sectoral (agricultural, forest, water systems, etc.) impact studies in collaboration with T5’s Subtopics. We have unique know-how to deliver scalable, mechanistic, adapted complexity, robust, and transferable (SMART) model systems of unprecedented time and space resolution. These model systems are parameterized in a goal-oriented approach and deliver reliable future projections of impacts on terrestrial and freshwater systems together with a quantification of the overall result uncertainty. Due to this unique approach, various adaptation strategies, including planning for socio-economic sectors and policymaking, can be developed at a regional scale but with a consistent national and continental coverage. To parameterize these models we develop and apply innovative observation and monitoring strategies, using integrated observatories like TERENO at national scale or eLTER (Long-Term Ecosystem Research in Europe) at European scale, event monitoring like through MOSES as well as integrated products from our new Remote Sensing Centre (RSC). The most advanced computing and data science methods like exascale and quantum computing, as well as AI technologies, Open Science and technologically intelligent multi-thematic data repositories do significantly support the progress.

Spokesperson: Sabine Attinger (UFZ)
 

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Balancing resource use and the multitude of landscape functions (e.g., air and water quality, soil carbon, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, pollination, contributions to human health) requires an understanding of societal and economic drivers, behavioral responses, governance structures, and societal change processes. To this end, the full range of social sciences (economics, sociology, political science, law, and systems analysis) will be deployed, and results of biodiversity and water research from the natural sciences will be integrated. Based on this, appropriate transformation pathways towards multifunctional landscapes will be developed and assessed. Stakeholders will be involved in science-policy-dialogues to ensure coherence, compliance, legitimacy, and effectiveness of policy recommendations in complex decision-making arenas. Based on our long-lasting experience in inter- and transdisciplinary research we derive policy options for, e.g., the EU Common Agricultural Policy, or the definition of water quality targets for the EU Water Framework Directive beyond 2027. Cities are decision-making arenas of special interest: being hot spots of increasing land and resource use, greenhouse gas emissions, and a multitude of diverse actor groups, they specifically require a societal balancing of diverse interests and multiple trade-offs. The urban-rural nexus opens up options for sustainable transformation pathways, for example, in the fields of green and blue urban infrastructures.

Spokesperson: Bernd Hansjürgens (UFZ)