Dr. Anna Cord started her postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) with the head of our department Prof. Dr. Stefan Dech and other members of the committee. Her qualification is about:

“Multifunctional landscapes – Understanding and balancing the multifaceted links between land use, biodiversity and ecosystem services”

Human population growth, changing lifestyles, and growing demands for natural resources (e.g., food, clean water, fertile soils, and timber) put the world’s ecosystems under increasing pressure, often with unfavorable effects on their capacity to provide ecosystem services. Trade-offs between land use and biodiversity conservation are intensifying and increasingly challenging to resolve; the provision of ecosystem services is not secured in the long term in many regions. At the same time, we lack a profound understanding of the complex relationships between biodiversity, land use and ecosystem services, which makes the search for sustainable management strategies substantially more difficult.

This habilitation project examines the suitability of the concept of “multifunctional landscapes” for understanding and resolving these conflicting goals and combines research concepts, approaches and methods from various fields (ecology, geography, remote sensing, social sciences). The scientific goals of the habilitation are in particular (i) the theoretical-conceptional further development of the term “landscape multifunctionality”, (ii) methodological innovation in the field of spatio-temporal modeling of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and (iii) the formulation of recommendations for the design of multifunctional landscapes, based on scientific synthesis and model results.