Art des Angebots: Masterarbeit

Problem

Livestock production can have both positive and negative impact on biodiversity (Kok et al., 2020). Only few approaches account for the indirect impact of livestock, namely through feed, on biodiversity (Kok et al., 2020). Among those are some LCA methods, that link feed production to habitat loss or species diversity based on land use (Souza et al., 2015), often omitting pressures from land-use intensity on biodiversity (Qiu et al., 2021; Seppelt et al., 2020; Winter et al., 2013).
Among these pressures is nitrogen deposition (Posch et al., 2011) that could be directly linked to livestock production through nitrogen loss such as ammonia vitalization from resulting from nitrogen in manure or nitrogen leaching via runoffs.
In addition, there is a growing recognition that environmental impacts are context specific, calling for spatial modeling to derive the environmental impacts of livestock, including biodiversity (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2019).
The objective of this master thesis is to answer following questions :

1. What are the most recent methods to assess impact of livestock production on biodiversity?
2. Which of these methods could be spatialized and how?
3. How can the most promising method be operationalized for spatially explicit impact assessment on biodiversity to assess impact of livestock production at landscape scale for the whole of Europe?

This thesis requires at least basic GIS skills, possibly experience with R coding and a strong willingness to learn implementing GIS in R with the new spatial package (sf, terra).
This master thesis is part of the European project PATHWAYS, pathways for transitions to sustainability in livestock husbandry and food system.

Method

Literature review, spatial modeling (with R)

Contact

Catherine Pfeifer