Richard Fuchs

Richard Fuchs is group leader of the Land Use Data Analysis and Modelling Group and deputy division head of the Land Use Change and Climate research division. His main research focus is on land cover/use, its changes and land management. His emphasis is on dynamics and pathways of land changes to understand land management strategies of countries and regions (e.g. the EU). He studies land-climate interactions, largely by assessing large-amounts of data, remote sensing products using spatial land use modelling techniques (past and futures). He is interested how land management affects global climate and vice versa.

During his PhD in Wageningen Richard developed the historic land cover/use reconstruction model HILDA (http://www.wur.eu/hilda) which provides a reconstruction of Europe’s land cover/use and its changes of the last century (1900-2010) at 1km spatial resolution. Here in the Land Use Change and Climate research group, Karina Winkler is working, together with Richard, on the global follow-up version of this model, the HILDA+. Their recent project is to integrate land management into HILDA+ to assess the interplay of land expansion vs. intensification.

Using such data, Richard assesses how global crop production strategies can be optimized to maximize food production and limit environmental degradation. For example, he studies the efficiency in fertilizer use of top crop producers in the world and ways forward to improve their efficiency. He is particularly interested in the upper limits of agricultural intensification and the margins to reach them, but also in potentials of reducing the negative environmental consequences of such intensive forms of land use.

For this reason, he assess what roles food technologies (vertical farming, gene-editing, plant-based meat) can play it future global food security, because these technologies promise to save land area for production and inputs (e.g. fertilizer or pesticides). He works with Spencer Roberts on developing food technology scenarios using HILDA+ to assess the global upscale potential of these technolgies and their contribution to future food security.

 

 

Email: richard.fuchs@kit.edu
Telephone: +49 8821 183 161