Land Use, Earth Observation, and Sustainability

Ongoing Research Projects

The research group is engaged in projects that are funded through national and international grants. Most of the projects are carried out in cooperation with other research institutions in Denmark, Europe, and across the Globe.

The list is organized chronologically, with the most recent projects first:

• Resilient Ecosystem of Sweden: Promoting Sustainability through Continuous Cover. Forestry and Wetland Rewetting, FORMAS, 2024-2026. PI Stéphanie Horion
• HEIDA - Reconcilling hydrological and ecological models to understand impacts of increasing drought and aridity, Geocenter, 2024-2025. PI Stéphanie Horion
• Global Wetland Center, Novo Nordisk Fonden (Challenge program), 2024-2029. PI Stéphanie Horion
• Climate, Pollinator biodiversity, Crop Pollination and People’s Livelihood, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2024-2029. Co-PI Laura Vang Rasmussen
• EUROPELAND - Towards Sustainable Land-Use in Europe. EU Horizon Europe 2023-2027. PI Martin Rudbeck Jepsen.
• ALPMEMA - Alpine Mountain Hay Meadows Management: Best practices to maintain their Favorable Conservation Status against underuse under different property right regimes inside and outside protected areas. Biodiversa+ grant 2023-2026. PI Alexander Prischepov
• An innovative ‘Forest and Trees Toolkit’ for reducing malnutrition in Africa. ERC POC grant, 2023-2025. PI Laura Vang Rasmussen
• CLISA - Unravelling climate change impacts on savanna vegetation ecosystems. The Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF; FNU), 2022-2026. PI Rasmus Fensholt
• Risk-assessment of Vector-borne Diseases Based on Deep Learning and Remote Sensing. Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF), 2022-2026. PI Rasmus Fensholt
• Draindetect - Mapping drained carbon-rich wetlands. Geocenter fund, 2022-2025. PI Martin Rudbeck Jensen
• FairFrontiers - Fair for whom? Power, politics and precarity in transformations of tropical forest-agriculture frontiers. Grant from Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto, Japan, 2021-2026. PI Ole Mertz and Thilde Bech Bruun
• DRYTIP - Drought-induced tipping points in ecosystem functioning: Coupled insights from Earth Observation, Dynamic Vegetation Model and Field Ecology. Villum Young Investigator, 2021-2026. PI Stéphanie Horion
• RurbanClimate - Climate Resilience Across the Rural-Urban Continuum. Research grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2021-2025. CO-A Ole Mertz, Laura Vang Rasmussen and Stéphanie Horion
• AridLand – The response and resistance of global tropical drylands to increasing aridity. ESA CCI Research Fellowship, 2021-2023. PI Christin Abel
• PerformLCA – High performance land change assessment through coupling of AI, high performance computing and Earth Observation. KU Data+ grant, 2021-2024. PI Stéphanie Horion
• DeReEco- Combining remote sensing and artificial intelligence to improve current understanding of global change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Villum Synergy Grant, 2020-2025. PI Rasmus Fensholt
• TOFDRY -Trees outside forests in global drylands. ERC starting grant 2020-2025. PI Martin Brandt
• Reinterpreting how forests support people's dietary quality in low-income countries. ERC starting grant, 2020-2025. PI Laura Vang Rasmussen
• Mapping, characterizing and analyzing individual trees and shrubs outside forests in African drylands.DFF Sapere Aude grant, 2020–2024. PI Martin Brandt

Recently completed Research Projects

• C-TREES - Tracking Carbon Sequestration at Tree Level. EU EUROSTARS, 2021-2023
• TRACE - Plastics from source to sink: Exploring transport pathways and fate of plastic waste in coastal waters. Geocenter Denmark, 2020-2023
• CaSSECS – Carbon Sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions in (agro) Sylvopastoral Ecosystems in the Sahelian CILSS States. EU, 2020-2023
• BSU 3 - Building Stronger Universities.Program with Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), Tanzania.  Danida, 2017-2023