Seminar: Social-Ecological Interactions Around Biodiversity: Patterns and Processes

My 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 I lead at UZH leads is three-fold: (i) remote sensing of biodiversity, (ii) ecosystem services and (iii) social-ecological systems and resilience for sustainability. As such we conduct research at the global level using remote sensing, and process-based models of carbon and water cycle to understand how biodiversity influences these processes. We also work 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, given the different contexts provided by the local conditions. 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), and leads a Solutions Oriented research for development (SOR4D) on social-ecological approaches to study effectiveness of ecological restoration (2024). Recently she was also awarded two projects by the European Space Agency on developing fusion algorithms that integrate imaging spectroscopy with RADAR data to assess ecosystem responses to drought and a project to review the approaches, algorithms and EO data used to monitor ecosystem transitions and the responses of the land biosphere to global changes.