Master Thesis - Agricultural Landscapes

The UFZ

The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) with its 1,100 employees has gained an excellent reputation as an international competence centre for environmental sciences.

We are part of the largest scientific organisation in Germany, the Helmholtz association. Our mission : Our research seeks to find a balance between social development and the long-term protection of our natural resources.

The job

The optimal allocation of land uses that maximize the provision of ecosystem services is one way to address environmental problems in agricultural landscapes.

Optimization algorithms can generate thousands of mathematically optimal solutions from which preferred solutions are usually selected a posteriori’, i.

e. after the optimization process by stakeholders. An alternative is to use interactive optimization that allows for the inclusion of stakeholder preferences during the optimization process.

Here, the algorithm periodically stops and the stakeholders are asked to rank the preliminary solutions. This process is repeated thus steering the algorithm towards the stakeholder’s preferred solutions.

In the thesis, the master student will couple a newly developed interactive optimization algorithm (based on NSGA-II) with simple models for different ecosystem services.

The work also includes the further development of the decision module of the solution’s ranking, and to adapt the currently non-spatial optimization to spatially-explicit optimization problems.

The algorithm should then be applied to a virtual study area. This rather conceptual work is an important first step for making the approach applicable to real-world optimization problems.

The student will be based in the working group AgriScape () at UFZ’s Department of Computational Landscape Ecology in strong collaboration with the Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science (ECCS) Department of Ohio Northern University, US.

Start of the work is flexible.

The position to prepare the Master's thesis will be supervised at the site in Leipzig.

Your tasks

• Adapting an already existing interactive optimization algorithm to spatially-explicit optimization problems
• Further development of the solution’s ranking within the algorithm
• Coupling the algorithm with existing simple ecosystem services models
• Application of the algorithm to a virtual study area

We offer

• Excellent supervision that supports your personal and professional development
• Exciting insights into the work of a leading research institute
• The chance to work in interdisciplinary, international teams and benefit from a wide range of perspectives
• The opportunity to contribute and actively shape your own ideas and impulses

right from the start

Modern technical equipment and IT service to optimally support your work

Your profile

• Enrolled master student in Geography (with strong interest in programming), Computer Science / Informatics, Mathematics or similar
• Very good programming skills in Python, optionally also in R
• Experience in using GitLab / Github beneficial
• Knowledge about multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithms (NSGA-II) is an advantage
• Interest in ecosystem services and land-use conflicts
• Independent and structured way of working
• High proficiency in English
Vor 30+ Tagen