EESS seminar talk on "How do we understand biodiversity: from measurements to processes"

The current recognition that the loss of biodiversity will potentially irreversibly affect Earth system processes and human well-being has led to the recognition that we actually don't know much about biodiversity, or not in a systematic way that can be used for decision making. Large efforts have been put forward to monitoring biodiversity, making use of a wealth of different types of data, but also a big effort is now on data analytics and more important in process understanding towards predictive biodiversity science. In this presentation I will go through a road map of what is needed to achieve this goal, as predictive biodiversity science will enable better decision making. I will organize the talk on (i) monitoring biodiversity with remote sensing and (ii) what can we do with that data. I will present some cases on the projects in our lab.
 

Maria is Associate Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on understanding co-evolution in social-ecological systems, in particular of the relationship between human livelihoods and biodiversity. The expertise of the Earth System Science (ESS) chair group that Maria leads is three-fold: (i) remote sensing of biodiversity, (ii) ecosystem services and (iii) social-ecological systems and resilience for sustainability. As such she conducts research at the global level using remote sensing, and process-based models of carbon and water cycle to understand how biodiversity influences these processes. She also works at the local community level to go indepth in the understanding of how the global level processes get responded to and are fully coupled with decision making at local scales. Maria leads projects on (earth) observations to action to respond to policy demands for monitoring biodiversity (OBSGESSION, 2024), is co-PI on a BRIDGE project on spatial sustainable finance (2022), is a co-PI on a ESA project to merge imaging spectroscopy and SAR to understand biodiversity responses to drought, and leads a Solutions Oriented research for development (SOR4D) on social-ecological approaches to study effectiveness of ecological restoration (2024). Recently she as the PI and her team were awarded the new SCOUT satellite mission HIBIDIS, as a new mission to observe biodiversity.
Maria has a PhD in Ecology from the University of California Davis, and two graduate certificates in conservation management from UC Davis and  one in innovation and entrepreneurship from Stanford University. Before her position at UZH, Maria was Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, and postdoctoral researcher at both the University of California Berkeley and Stanford University.