Erik Kusch

Erik Kusch
CICERO Center for International Climate Research · Climate and Nature Risk

PhD

About

22
Publications
5,076
Reads
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118
Citations
Introduction
I am a biostatistician and data scientist specialised in streamlining work-flows as well as integrating and analysing big data. I use and develop quantitative tools to study resilience and macoecology to understand ecosystems trajectories through time and space. To this end, I have created and continue to develop an R-package (KrigR) to enable the download of data from ECMWF CDS services, perform spatial limitation, temporal aggregation, and statistically interpolate these products.
Additional affiliations
March 2023 - December 2024
University of Oslo
Position
  • Senior Engineer
Description
  • Lead-coder for digital twinning as well as infrastructure management.
January 2020 - January 2023
Aarhus University
Position
  • PhD Student
Description
  • I am currently working on my PhD project centred around identifying the effects of extinction debt following differential extinctions on complex networks of species-dependency across three distinct trophic levels on a global scale. Find more about my work here: https://erikkusch.com/
August 2017 - August 2019
Leipzig University
Position
  • Research Assistant
Description
  • Analysing primate odour profiles; assessing a variety of statistical methods for analytical power in identifying odour effects; tutoring students on biostatistics.
Education
August 2017 - July 2019
University of Bergen
Field of study
  • Biology (Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution)
August 2016 - February 2017
University of Bergen
Field of study
  • Biology
August 2015 - December 2015
University of Bergen
Field of study
  • Biology

Publications

Publications (22)
Article
Full-text available
Advances in climate science have rendered obsolete the gridded observation data widely used in downstream applications. Novel climate reanalysis products outperform legacy data products in accuracy, temporal resolution, and provision of uncertainty metrics. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop a workflow through which to integrate these...
Article
Full-text available
(1) Earth’s biosphere is undergoing drastic reorganization due to the sixth mass extinction brought on by the Anthropocene. Impacts of local and regional extirpation of species have been demonstrated to propagate through the complex interaction networks they are part of, leading to secondary extinctions and exacerbating biodiversity loss. Contempor...
Article
Canopy gaps play a pivotal role in tropical forest ecosystems, influencing succession, carbon dynamics, ecosystem function, and biodiversity. Here we investigated canopy gap dynamics, tree species regeneration, and associated factors in one of the Moist Afromontane tropical forests, the Gerba Dima forest of southwest Ethiopia. Located within a prec...
Preprint
Full-text available
European biodiversity research infrastructures (BioRIs) play a critical role in addressing the escalating biodiversity crisis by providing data, tools, and services necessary for scientific research and policy-making. However, despite their potential, these infrastructures are often fragmented in terms of communication and coordination, scientific...
Article
Full-text available
A severe impact of human-induced climate change is the global decrease in crop yields, threatening the United Nations sustainable development goal (SDG) to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture (SDG 2: “Zero Hunger Goal”). Decision-making on appropriate mitigation strategies requires data integrat...
Preprint
The burgeoning interest in digital twin (DT) technology presents a transformative potential for ecological modelling, offering new ways to model the complex dynamics of ecosystems. This paper introduces the TwinEco framework, designed to mitigate fragmentation in the development and deployment of DT applications in ecology. Compared to traditional...
Article
Full-text available
Amidst population growth and climate-driven crop stresses such as drought, extreme weather, fungal and insect pests, as well as various crop diseases, ensuring food security demands innovative strategies. Crop wild relatives (CWR), wild plants in the same genus as the crop as well as wild populations belonging to the same species as the crop, offer...
Preprint
Full-text available
Amidst population growth and climate-driven crop stresses, ensuring food security demands innovative strategies. Crop wild relatives (CWR), wild plants in the same genus as the crop, offer novel genetic resources crucial for enhancing crop resilience. Here, we introduce a prototype digital twin (pDT) to aid in searching and utilising CWR genetic re...
Article
Full-text available
Alpine grassland vegetation supports globally important biodiversity and ecosystems that are increasingly threatened by climate warming and other environmental changes. Trait-based approaches can support understanding of vegetation responses to global change drivers and consequences for ecosystem functioning. In six sites along a 1314 m elevational...
Article
Full-text available
The Biodiversity Digital Twin (BioDT) project (2022-2025) aims to create prototypes that integrate various data sets, models, and expert domain knowledge enabling prediction capabilities and decision-making support for critical issues in biodiversity dynamics. While digital twin concepts have been applied in industries for continuous monitoring of...
Preprint
Full-text available
1. Understanding how the differential magnitude and sign of ecological interactions vary across space is vital to assessing ecosystem resilience to biodiversity loss and predict community assemblies. This necessity for ecological network knowledge and their labour-intensive sampling requirements has spurred the creation of ecological network infere...
Preprint
Full-text available
Forecasting biodiversity and functioning changes to ecosystem composition and functioning under climate change requires using multi-species approaches that explicitly consider ecological interactions. Here, we propose a framework with which to incorporate considerations of (1) localised extinction risk proxies, (2) resilience mechanisms of ecologic...
Preprint
Full-text available
A bstract Several methods of ecological network inference have been proposed, but their consistency and applicability for use across ecologically relevant scales require further investigation. Here, we infer ecological networks using two data sets (YFDP, FIA) describing distributional and attribute information at local, regional, and continental sc...
Poster
Full-text available
The main goal of the Crop Wild Relatives Digital Twin is to develop a digital twin prototype that enables the search and utilization of unexplored novel genetic assets present in wild relatives of cultivated crops. This innovative approach will enable the enhancement of domesticated crop resilience to various environmental challenges like drought,...
Article
Full-text available
Despite exponential growth in ecological data availability, broader interoperability amongst datasets is needed to unlock the potential of open access. Our understanding of the interface of demography and functional traits is well-positioned to benefit from such interoperability. Here, we introduce MOSAIC, an open-access trait database that unlocks...
Article
Full-text available
Introduced large herbivores have partly filled ecological gaps formed in the late Pleistocene, when many of the Earth's megafauna were driven extinct. However, extant predators are generally considered incapable of exerting top‐down influences on introduced megafauna, leading to unusually strong disturbance and herbivory relative to native herbivor...
Article
Full-text available
Vegetation memory describes the effect of antecedent environmental and ecological conditions on the present ecosystem state and has been proposed as an important proxy for vegetation resilience. In particular, strong vegetation memory has been identified in dryland regions, but the factors underlying the spatial patterns of vegetation memory remain...
Preprint
Full-text available
The ecological sciences have joined the big data revolution. However, despite exponential growth in data availability, broader interoperability amongst datasets is still needed to unlock the potential of open access. The interface of demography and functional traits is well-positioned to benefit from said interoperability. Trait-based ecological ap...
Article
Full-text available
There is an increasing need for high spatial and temporal resolution climate data for the wide community of researchers interested in climate change and its consequences. Currently, there is a large mismatch between the spatial resolutions of global climate model and reanalysis datasets (at best around 0.25 o and 0.1 o respectively) and the resolut...
Preprint
A bstract Vegetation memory describes the effect of antecedent environmental and ecological conditions on the present ecosystem state and has been proposed as an important proxy for vegetation resilience. In particular, strong vegetation-memory effects have been identified in dryland regions, but the factors underlying the spatial patterns of veget...
Preprint
Full-text available
There is an increasing need for high spatial and temporal resolution climate data for the wide community of researchers interested in climate change and its consequences. Currently, there is a large mismatch between the spatial resolutions of global climate model and reanalysis datasets (at best around 0.25o and 0.1o respectively) and the resolutio...
Preprint
Full-text available
We present KrigR, an R package for acquiring and statistically downscaling state-of-the-art climate data using kriging. KrigR allows R-users to (1) download ERA5 and ERA5-Land climate reanalysis data for a user-specified region, and time-length, (2) aggregate these climate products to desired temporal resolutions and metrics, (3) acquire topographi...

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