Presentation of Sub-Projects & Principal Investigators

A1. Mapping land management archetypes by multisensor remote sensing data and machine learning

Start: October 1^st, 2024

Spatial-temporal information on land use can support our understanding of how regime shifts and systemic risks emerge in response to agricultural land use

• Multisensor Earth-Observation (EO) data and advances in (big-)data analysis offer new opportunities in context of environmental remote sensing
• A1 aims on mapping land management archetypes4 as indicators for agriculture stresses on aquatic ecosystems using multisensor EO-data and deep-learning (DL) methods

 Poster of sub-project A1 (PDF, 1.37 MB)

 Institute of Computer Science

A2. Biocontrol of eutrophication: Modeling food webs in small streams and their capacity to dam impacts from agriculture

Start: October 1^st, 2024

• Intensive agriculture can cause water quality problems such as ‘eutrophication of streams’
• Insufficient: mere fertilizer reduction (hysteresis)
• Often overseen: capacity of instream food webs to ‚biocontrol‘ eutrophication (ecosystem service)
• But: exposure to multiple stressors from climate and agriculture with unclear combined impacts
• Needed: Modeling framework for causal understanding, prediction and decision-support

 Poster of sub-project A2 (PDF, 0.93 MB)

 Institute of Environmental Systems Research

 Centre for Environmental Research

A3. Ecological resilience in the flow: Modeling spatiotemporal population dynamics in rivers

Start: October 1^st, 2024

• River ecosystems are subject to a dynamic spatio-temporal mosaic of environmental conditions
• Species distribution is influenced by
  • Favorable habitats as “footholds” in adverse times
  • Unfavorable habitats “traversable” in opportune times
• We will use dynamic, spatially explicit models to identify spatiotemporal patterns of agricultural, hydromorphological, and hydrometeorological perturbations that can cause regime shifts in species distribution

 Poster of sub-project A3 (PDF, 820 kB)

 Institute of Environmental Systems Research

A4. Evaluating the impact of agricultural land-use on wildlife populations, using deep learning

Start: October 1^st, 2026

• A4 aims at the relationship between agricultural activities and ecological regime shifts
• Landscape-scale ecological models such as ALMaSS1 and others allow the evaluation of the impact of land use management on wildlife
• Deep-Learning (DL) plays a key role in data-driven environmental science, while standard-ized workflows are limited and DL models demand huge amounts of training data

 Poster of sub-project A4 (PDF, 1.16 MB)

 Institute of Computer Science

 Institute of Environmental Systems Research

A5. Balancing agricultural and environmental water demand to address the sensitivity of socio-ecological systems

Start: October 1^st, 2026

• Water scarcity challenges agriculture and the environment with heightening uncertainty and conservation needs. In NW Germany, this requires a shift from traditional drainage to water conservation systems which address imminent drought risks.
• SES sensitivity with scenario analysis identifies ecological regime shifts under varied hydro-climatic and agricultural scenarios. This guides water allocation within ecological limits and reduces systemic risk.

 Poster of sub-project A5 (PDF, 906 kB)

 Institute of Geography

B1. Regime shifts and human behavior in agricultural systems

Start: B1a October 1^st, 2024; B2b October 1^st, 2026

• Undesirable regime shifts are often at least partly driven by agricultural land use decisions
• Understanding farmer behavior in the face of regime shifts is key to initiate adequate governance responses
• It is unknown if and how risk experienced farmers perceive regime  shifts and emanating systemic risks, and how their land use decisions are affected by these perceptions, their beliefs, preferences and  indications of warning signals
• When proposing governance responses, consider diverse policy tools regulating (e. g., European) farmer behavior, each varying in suitability for addressing shifts in farming regimes

 Poster of sub-project B1 (PDF, 655 kB)

 School of Business Administration and Economics

B2. The influence of farmers’ perceptions of (systemic) risk and potential regime shifts in the decision to adopt or maintain certain agricultural practices

Start: October 1^st, 2024

To date, risk has played a subordinate role in Global Production Networks (GPN) research. An objective economic notion of risk and uncertainty, as well as risk-or-reward-thinking still dominates. B2 is grounded in the premise that risk is shaped by subjective perception and interpretation processes of relationally connected individuals or a collective of organisational decision-makers. Whether and how risks are perceived influences the reactions of actors and the regime shifts that may be associated with them. The organisation of the economy in GPNs and the associated potentially large spatial distance between places of action and places of impact makes it significantly more difficult to perceive the risks associated with one's own actions for oneself and for others. B2 examines this relationship using the example of farmers and their decision to introduce or maintain certain agricultural practices. The envisaged result of this project is not only a contribution to the literature on risk management in agri-food networks and the importance of risk assessment for the sustainability transformation of agriculture but also a  further conceptual development of risk in the GPN approach.

 Poster of sub-project B2 (PDF, 837 kB)

 Institute of Geography

B3. Participatory interventions to foster cooperation in face of regime shifts and systemic risk

Start: B3a October 1^st, 2024; B3b October 1^st, 2026

• Risks of ecological regime shifts in telecoupled agricultural systems demand cooperation and coordination among actors with different interests and located in distant places.
• Participatory methods (e.g. perspective taking, vision building) can promote inner change (e.g. perceptions of social distance/norms, trust, other-regarding preferences) for sustainability transformation.
• This project contributes to (i) understanding behavior and the role of inner factors in telecoupled settings facing systemic risks involving heterogeneous actors, and (ii) adapting and assessing impacts of participatory methods for such settings.

 Poster of sub-project B3 (PDF, 892 kB)

 School of Business Administration and Economics

B4. Understanding Non-Adaption to Systemic Risks: The case of farm-handovers

Start: B4a October 1^st, 2024; B4b October 1^st, 2026

• Farm handovers (typically from one generation to the other) are “critical junctures” in the transformation towards sustainable agriculture

• Although knowledge on the systemic risks of intensive agriculture is abundant, the majority of farm handovers lead to the continuation of intensive agriculture

• By analyzing non-adaptation in farm handovers, the project contributes to the understanding of the persistence of conventional agriculture as well as to the development of potential solutions for the governance and management of a regime shift towards a more sustainably SES

 Poster of sub-project B4 (PDF, 828 kB)

 Institute of Social Science

B5. The effect of environmental perception of hydro-climatic uncertainty and risk on agricultural decision-making

Start: October 1^st, 2024

Farmers are experts in coping with climate variability, but increasing hydro-climatic extremes force them to apply new strategies to reduce systemic risks. Paying attention to farmers’ hetero-geneity and unevenly distributed levels of agency and aspiration affecting their management strategies, is critical to understand how agricultural decisions influence regime shifts.

 Poster of sub-project B5 (PDF, 781 kB)

 Institute of Geography

C1. Capacity of governance systems to respond to early warning signals

Start: October 1^st, 2024

• Major knowledge gaps exist in understanding anticipatory response to regime shifts and associated systemic risks
• Response to drought crises as model systems
• Development of conceptual foundations and typologies to classify governance systems and crises responses

 Poster of sub-project C1 (PDF, 1.16 MB)

 Institute of Geography

C2. The emergence of collective action: the role of narratives in social networks

Start: October 1^st, 2026

• Major knowledge gaps exist on what determines the anticipatory and transformative capacity of risk governance
• Network governance is assumed to have a key role by fostering cooperation and collective action among heterogenous actor groups
• Analysis of narratives and their dynamics in social networks as innovative approach to identify key characteristics of such transformative change

 Poster of sub-project C2 (PDF, 729 kB)

 Institute of Geography

C3. Governance designs in telecoupled problem situations

Start: C3a October 1^st, 2024; C3b October 1^st, 2026

• Risk of ecological regime shifts in telecoupled agricultural systems demand coordinated governance approaches in the Global North and the Global South that are conscious of not only difference governance capacities, styles and contexts, but also of different risk perceptions
• Novel supply chain regulations in the Global North have the potential to cross the distance between (agricultural) producers and consumers, by establishing foreign corporate accountability for environmental risks along the supply chain
• This project contributes to an understanding of the effects of different regulatory designs (a) for corporate behavior and (b) for local governance addressing systemic risks

 Poster of sub-project C3 (PDF, 1.21 MB)

 Institute of Social Science

C4. Governance of mitigation strategies for systemic risks

Start: October 1^st, 2026

Companies that are organised with their supplier relationships in Global Production Networks (GPN) do have risk management structures in place. However, the governance of supplier structures is primarily focused on issues of cost and price. Issues of resilience and risk mitigation are subordinated to this. As a result, many companies need to prepare for unforeseen crises and sudden regime shifts. This also applies to companies in intensive agriculture in Europe, as fattening farms for pigs, e.g., have become dependent on importing feed from overseas. If harvests are poor this can impact the availability and prices of inputs. The factors that determine the ability of companies in agri-food networks to respond preventively to systemic risks have not yet been investigated. The project contributes to a better understanding of how to deal with systemic risks in GPN and shows how companies can make their supply relationships and corporate governance more resilient.

 Poster of sub-project C4 (PDF, 1.49 MB)

 Institute of Geography

C5. Multi-method modeling of farmers adopting agricultural practices: How do policy instruments tip collective action?

Start: October 1^st, 2026

• Policy instruments (e.g., agri-environmental schemes or regulation) are intended to influence agricultural practices
• How do policy instruments transpire from individual farmers to the collective level, and how effective are they?
• Modeling is a powerful tool to analyze the effectiveness and investigate scenarios

 Poster of sub-project C5 (PDF, 766 kB)

 Institute of Environmental Systems Research

 Centre for Environmental Research

P1. Data science methods for early warning of regime shifts

Start: October 1^st, 2024

• Early-warning signals (EWS) are key to revert, mitigate, or adapt to regime shifts
• Existing EWS are unreliable, difficult to interpret, and too late for management to respond
• We will complement data-driven and mechanistic methods to improve the interpretability of machine learning prediction (“informed/explain-able artificial intelligence”)

 Poster of sub-project P1 (PDF, 1.27 MB)

 Institute of Environmental Systems Research

 Institute of Computer Science

P2. Design principles for governing systemic risk

Start: October 1^st, 2024

• Major knowledge gaps on requirements for risk governance to address systemic risks
• Systematic approach to classifying risk problems and capacity at different governance levels and by different actor groups to deal with them
• Derivation of design principles for governing systemic risk for the first time

 Poster of sub-project P2 (PDF, 1.06 MB)

 Institute of Geography

Coordination

Start: October 1^st, 2024

The ECORISK coordinator will support the spokesperson with implementing the programme. The coordinator will manage day-to-day operations including the organisation of meetings, the preparation of reports, bookkeeping, evaluations, and the coordination of workshops, lecture series and colloquia. Programme management also involves maintaining information on all individuals involved in ECORISK, maintaining calendars with important dates of seminars, lectures and other events, and maintaining a record of publications. All of these activities will be coordinated, as needed, with the respective faculties involved in ECORISK. Along with the International Office of UOS, the coordinator will offer support to international students. The ECORISK coordinator will provide support, in close cooperation with the Equal Opportunity Office. Furthermore, the ECORISK coordinator has an advisory role in the steering commitee.

 Institute of Geography