Benjamin Stocker
Group leader, Prof.
Geocomputation and Earth Observation, Institute of Geography, University of Bern
This is my research group’s website. Here, you can learn about who we are, and about our research. And you can explore our open access tools for the community, and our freely accessible learning materials.
As a group, we are a collection of climate, ecosystem, and data scientists with a special interest in interactions between global environmental change and terrestrial ecology and biogeochemistry.
Our work yields insights into climate change impacts on land ecosystems and provides data-informed predictions of how forests and grasslands respond to a climatic extreme events, rising CO2 and changes in nutrient cycles. We use Earth observation data and develop process-based models that are founded on eco-evolutionary optimality principles to explain plant traits and their adaptation and acclimation to the environment. In more data-driven approaches, we apply machine learning and data assimilation techniques using diverse ecological data (ecosystem flux measurements, forest inventories, remote sensing, and manipulation experimental data, etc.). In brief, we are building models, as simple as possible and as complex as necessary to learn the most. All open access, of course.
We are motivated to gain a better understanding of issues that are becoming increasingly pressing to society and policy and that are key to creating a sustainable future.
- Climate-biosphere interactions
- Forecasting drought impacts
- Monitoring the carbon cycle from space
- Developing next-generation vegetation models
- Model-data integration and machine-learning