Swantje Gebhardt MSc

PhD Candidate
Environmental Sciences

Welcome to my profile page! I'm a PhD candidate in the SPLENDID project, which aims to assess the environmental and socio-economic impacts of reorganizing land use patterns for sustainable agriculture. In this role, I'm mainly responsible for modelling the consequences of different land use scenarios for multiple relevant ecosystem services. For this research, I have investigated the interactions between agricultural intensity and spatial land use configuration settings as well as their influence on ecosystem service flows. Further, I have simulated the spatial processes sustaining ecosystem services to inform landscape planning and participatory processes. To support stakeholder discussions on the role of ecosystem service tradeoffs in land use conflicts and on opportunities for spatial planning for multinational landscapes, my colleagues and I developed PLACES, a participatory land use design tool that calculated the impacts of the users' land use allocation choices on several ecosystem services in real time. 

Due to my geography background, I have a great interest in spatial processes, including ecological, environmental, and societal ones. It is my goal to bring a better understanding of these processes into landscape management and decision-making. Therefore, I enjoy working with diverse data for spatial and statistical analysis, as well as in stakeholder communication and co-production of knowledge in spatial problems.