Digital tools for ecological assessment of landcover changes
Date and time: 15 March 2022, 15:00 – 16:00 CET (UTC +1)
Speaker: Ulla Mörtberg, Associate Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Title: Digital tools for ecological assessment of landcover changes
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Meeting ID: 695 6088 7455
Password: 755440
Host/administrator: Stacy Hsueh: shsueh@kth.se
Watch the recorded presentation:
Abstract: Global changes caused by human activities cause serious threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services, from climate change to land-use change, and from urban to rural landscapes. In urbanising landscapes, several habitats are continuously lost and with them critical ecosystem services. In peri-urban and rural landscapes, devastating fires, as well as more or less unsustainable management, have major impacts. Among affected habitats, the forest is a key player, not at least when it comes to old-growth forests and their significance for carbon storage, and biodiversity. The continuous and widespread changes can be detected and monitored with increasing detail and accuracy using artificial intelligence, such as in the Digital Futures project EO-AI4GC. As a part of this project, we need to assess the ecological impacts of the detected changes. Since the changes are rapid and multifaceted and occur on different scales, we need digital tools for ecological assessment that can localise, quantify and compare habitat loss and fragmentation in an effective way. For this purpose, we build up digital ecological assessment tools including a set of virtual species, where their combined traits encompass those of real-world species and show more or less vulnerability to the landscape changes. In this seminar, I will present several studies on ecological assessment tools and their application in urban and rural landscapes.
Bio: Ulla Mörtberg is an associate professor at the Dept. of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She is interested in spatial and environmental systems analysis. Her work explores and develops digital tools for ecological assessment targeting biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Link to the profile of Ulla Mörtberg