SESI Exhibition 2024: An Artistic Journey

The project is aimed at harmonizing agricultural land-use with biodiversity conservation in a farming landscape in southeastern Australia. The researchers conducted interviews and stakeholder workshops to assess different perspectives and discourses and developed transformational pathways towards desirable futures.

The project investigates the contribution of biocultural diversity to sustainability including aspects of wellbeing, biodiversity, food sovereignty and environmental justice from a holistic perspective based on inter and transdisciplinary collaboration.

The Move’n’Sense project explores citizens’ senses of place in the borderscape and its relation to their everyday life and mobilities behavior. Through a participatory mapping (PPGIS) survey, mental mapping, and GIS analysis, the study reveals alternative spatial configurations and delimitations of the (individual) borderscapes that do or do not align with administrative and physical borders.

This project aims to understand the values and motivations of landowners in southern Chile towards ecosystem restoration, and to scope possibilities of medium-term collaboration with them in a future DFG Emmy-Noether project. The researchers conducted 100 interviews to gain valuable social-ecological insights and practical field knowledge.

These photos represent some of the fieldwork activities that underwrite a forthcoming book about cocoa.  The book traces a complex web of social-ecological relationships that emerge as cocoa transforms in unexpected ways.  These particular photos highlight people and places that are generally ignored by well-intentioned supply-chain interventions like Fairtrade: government nurseries that cultivate and distribute seedlings, transport ‘gangs’ that carry cocoa, stevedores and port workers, conditions and hazards aboard cargo ships, and consumers in Mexico who make indigenous preparations of chocolate often using beans sourced from West Africa.

This is an interdisciplinary research project studying food security and biodiversity conservation in southwestern Ethiopia. It covers a wide range of topics including biodiversity assessments, ecosystem services, livelihoods, social equity, population growth, governance and participatory scenario planning. Funding: European Research Council ERC.

This work is part of the Grassworks project, which investigates effects for successful grassland restoration in Germany. The photovoice was applied as a participatory method in the setting of a real-world laboratory for social-ecological grassland restoration. The photos capture individual perspectives on grasslands and explore what people value in these often overlooked ecosystems. The captions are provided by the participants in German (in brackets)

Konrad Gray

This study explores the emotional connections to pleasant and unpleasant places, perceived soundscapes, and use of the campus by students and staff. It enables conclusions for future Campus development that enhances well-being. The survey has been co-designed in a Bachelor-seminar. In preparation, students explored the Campus taking pictures of places they related to well-being.

Hannah Lena Oer

Students of the course “Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehungen in der Raumplanung – partizipative kartenbasierte Methoden” (Winter term 22/23)

This project explored the human-tree relationships along the rural-urban gradients in a growing megacity of southern India - Bengaluru. The researchers investigated the uses of trees in different locations such as near houses, streets, farms, temples, and sacred platforms and found that people value relational uses of trees more than instrumental ones with urbanization.

The goal of this research unit is to develop a social-ecological systems approach to ecosystem restoration. The project aims to generate general insights into ecological, social and social-ecological mechanisms underpinning restoration that can also be applied to other restoration settings. The research is carried out by a large team of researchers from many different institutions. For more information, visit ecosystemrestoration.net.

In the AlVelAl region (south-east Spain), farmers opt for regenerative agriculture as a means of halting soil degradation, increasing biodiversity, and promoting the socio-economic and cultural revitalization of the territory. Through this project, researchers explored the role of regenerative agriculture in the supply of ecosystem services, the relationships between people and nature, and the social cohesion in local communities and investigated whether regeneration is happening in other social-ecological domains beyond agriculture, and how they are interlinked.

The project “Demand for and Values of Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) in the Kilimanjaro Social-Ecological System” is embedded in the DFG Research Unit: “The role of nature for human wellbeing in the Kilimanjaro Social-Ecological System.” In the project, the researchers unraveled the demand for regulating, material and non-material NCP and elicited the diverse values of nature for the main stakeholder groups: farmers, nature conservationists, tour guides, and tourists.