James Ofori starts his PhD in the project GreenGaDe - Greenhouse Gas Determination in West Africa’s Agricultural Landscapes, together with Larissa Raatz, a former PhD student of our group, who will be joining the project as a project manager. GreenGaDe aims to provide baseline data and predict the evolution of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon stocks in the agricultural sector in West Africa. The project includes four West African and three German institutions with specialists in agronomy, forestry, modelling, environmental chemistry, sociology and GHG inventories who will use a multidisciplinary approach to build a consistent database at the local and regional level to help build climate change scenarios based on the dynamics of West Africa's Agricultural sector.

PhD student Judith Niedersen is joining the SeBAS project - Sensing Biodiversity Across Scales, a joint venture with remote sensing scientists of the University of Bonn. SeBAS aims to improve the understanding of land-use effects on the interplay between biodiversity – ecosystem functions – and ecosystem services. We are trying to achieve this by combining plot-based ecological and remote sensing research on land-use intensity, Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), and their temporal variation on different spatial scales in German grassland systems.