Hi. I’m Erik Kusch, a PhD student of Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity who creates and applies novel statistical methods big-data.

I aim to understand how global and local processes and patterns in biological systems come about and are reinforced thus generating knowledge about the resilience of the Earth’s ecosystems. My PhD project is under the guidance of Alejandro Ordonez and co-supervised by Roberto Salguero-Gómez.

Projects

A few things I am currently working on or have finished researching (for now).

Causes and Processes of Dryland Vegetation Memory

Throughout this project, I aim to identify underlying causes - biological and abiotic - to the striking patterns of vegetation memory I identified in a previous project.

Bayes Study Group

I have established and am running a group-exercise for learning Bayesian Statistics from the ground up with an assortment of colleagues. This group is run through zoom and open to anyone.

BIOlogical response RATES to current rates of environmental changes

My PhD project is a part of this greater research framework within which my colleagues and I investigate how species compositions and interactions are shaped.

Effects of Biological Extinctions across Scales and Trophic Levels

My PhD project and its working packages.

KrigR - Downloading and Downscaling of ERA5(-Land) data using R

An R package designed for intuitive downloading, aggregating, and statistical downscaling of ERA5(-Land) data.

Vegetation Memory across Global Dryland Regions

Vegetation memory has been proposed as a proxy for ecosystem resilience. Here, I investigate how well this proxy captures processes of vegetation performance.

Publications in review

A couple of publications I have submitted and am awaiting a publication decision on.

Erik Kusch, Richard Davy (2021). KrigR - A Tool for Statistically Downscaling Climate Reanalysis Data for Ecological Applications. Nature Scientific Data.

Project

Erik Kusch, Richard Davy, Alistair Seddon (2020). Vegetation memory effects and their association with vegetation resilience in global drylands. Journal of Ecology.

Project

Recent Publications

Research I have published and that you can read and digest at your leisure.

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.

Erik Kusch (2019). Inferring Vegetation Memory from Remote Sensing Data using novel Climate Reconstruction Products. University of Bergen.

PDF Code Project

Erik Kusch (2017). Remote Sensing And Predicting Shifts In Biome Distribution And Resilience Using NDVI Data. Technical University of Dresden.

PDF Code

Conference Talks & Presentations

Stuff I worked on by myself or with others and felt confident enough to put out there in front of people.

Erik Kusch

Dec 3, 2020 16:00 Online Meetings

Species Associations Across Scales of Organisation

A presentation of my PhD plans to the SalGo-Team.

Code Project Project Slides

Erik Kusch, Richard Davy

Nov 12, 2020 13:00 — 16:00 Online Workshop

KrigR - Downscaling State-of-the-Art Climate Data for Macroecologists

A web-based workshop to introduce the R-Package KrigR which introduces intuitive downloading and downscaling methods for ERA5(-Land) climate reanalysis data to R-users.

PDF Code Project Video

Erik Kusch, Richard Davy, Roberto Salguero-Gómez, Alistair Seddon

Jun 25, 2020 11:00 — 12:00 Online Conference