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The Institute of Landscape Ecology in the Faculty of Geosciences at the University of Münster, Germany, in collaboration with the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, The Netherlands, is seeking to fill the position of a

The research will focus on developing and testing methodologies to quantify and model peatland breathing using satellite optical and radar observations with machine learning algorithms. Peatlands are the largest natural terrestrial carbon store with an equivalent of half of the carbon that is in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2), and thereby they provide important ecosystem services for mitigating the effects of climate change. Peat breathing is the phenomenon of raising and lowering surface due to changes in the water level and can be regarded as a strong proxy for peatland condition and as an indicator of CO2 release. Peat breathing and resultant carbon fluxes are traditionally measured on a local scale and current methods don’t allow for a spatio-temporally comprehensive monitoring. In this research you will utilize satellite remote sensing, in particular radar technology and its integration with other observations. You will aim at three objectives: 1) to improve InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) methods for measuring long-term peatland motions as indicator for peat breathing on a large scale; 2) to correlate InSAR-derived peatland motions with field measurements; 3) to integrate all space-borne measurements into a machine learning model for improved mapping of CO2 release from peatland systems and validation with reference data from Eddy Covariance and chamber measurements.
You will be jointly supervised by Prof. Hanna Meyer from the University of Münster and Dr. Ling Chang from the University of Twente and you will benefit from complementary expertise in optical and radar remote sensing and work closely with both working groups. The place of work is Münster with regular research stays in Enschede.
This position is tied to working towards a doctorate.