Sustainability & Ressource Efficiency

Prof. Miyazaki, is a critical humanities scholar working on the theory, critique, and history of digital media, digitization, and computation as productive practice. He uses numerous social-critical, philosophical and technology-related theories of the last century (historical materialism, critical theory, poststructuralism, science and technology studies, media theory, media archaeology, postcolonialism, design studies). Currently, Prof. Miyazaki is working on the theory and history of alternative, non-profit, sustainable production practices that could be realized through other types of digitization. The focus is not only on social change, but also on technical-media change, which has no future without critical knowledge of technology.

PD Dr. Siddig is interested in studying the trade-offs and synergies between the production and use of water, energy, and food in developing countries as influenced by climate, population, and policy, including distributional, economic, and regional impacts.

Geographically, his research focuses on Africa and the Middle East. Methodologically, he relies largely on economy-wide simulation models, with CGE models leading the way (including ind GAMS and Gempack). In addition, Dr. Siddig works on capacity development in the area of database development and on policy simulation modeling in a development context.

Professor Hillman's research focuses on the influence of husbandry conditions and management practices on the welfare of farm animals. Her research in the area of animal welfare ranges from the validation of animal welfare indicators, including animal health, to the practical implementation of animal welfare measures.

Hillmann and her team concentrate on animal behavior. In addition, they use information on animal health, such as (stress)-physiological variables and economically relevant characteristics (e.g., meat quality).

Ethical and legal considerations also play a role in her research. However, practical problems in animal husbandry are in the foreground.  Besides classical behavioral observations, often with the help of video recordings, stress-physiological, clinical and cognitive parameters are added, but also techniques for automated recording of animal behavior.
Many problems in animal husbandry are related to a disturbance in behavioral control. Professor Hillmann's basic research in behavioral control thus also leads to solutions of practically relevant behavioral problems in farm, pet, laboratory, and zoo animals. Such solutions work at the roots of the problems because they are based on causal understanding of the underlying control mechanism.
In both application and basic questions, the measurement and consideration of the animals emotion plays a critical role as a component in the control of behavior, as well as in relation to their welfare.

Her research thus moves in the area of tension between scientific/clinical basic research, application and questions from the fields of agricultural economics and social sciences.

Prof. Ulrichs is an expert in the field of ecophysiology of plants with a special focus on plants in urban spaces. His team studies processes, which determine plant growth, e.g. stress exposure in an urban environment. The emphasis of his research lies on the analysis of the secondary metabolite balance (incl. its nutritional function), substance allocation, competition and plant-insect interaction. Prof. Ulrichs other major field of expertise is the quality assurance in food supply chains of horticultural products, especially for perishable foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables in temperate zones as well as in tropical/subtropical regions.

Prof. Hostert’s explores cutting-edge satellite data analysis. His main focus lies on questions regarding the global change, particularly large-scale mapping in agrarian- and forestry systems and near-nature ecological systems worldwide. He analyses the change of the earth’s surface through different methods, for example with machine learning, big data, time series analyses, hyperspectral and multisensor approaches, as well as multiscale analyses. Regional expertise of the team covers Germany, the mediterranean areas and South America, as well as Central Asia.

The team of Christoph Schneider works on the impacts of climate and climate change in the field of urban climates and in the field of cryospheric sciences (anything related to snow and ice). His expertise comprises the downscaling of meteorological respectively climatological data for applications in high spatial resolution, for example for urban planning and construction schemes and also for the analysis of potential impacts of climate change on the level of city quarters and cities. Furthermore, such numerical and empirical-statistical procedures are applied to the projection of future water resources in glaciated catchments in high alpine environments worldwide. This also leads to applications regarding the future state of snow covers in mountain ranges which is especially important for questions of future prospects of snow sport tourism. In both fields of applications, the urban climatology and the cryospheric research, measurement strategies and data acquisition of relevant atmospheric variables for the projects are used besides theoretical modelling approaches and downscaling as outlined above.