I am an early-career scientist interested in global change ecology. My research focusses on plant and landscape ecology in the Arctic tundra. I am particularly interested in how observational scales influence the inferences that we can make about natural phenomena and processes in complex ecological systems.
Currently, you can find me at the University of Zürich (Switzerland) where I am a postdoc with Gabriela Schaepman-Strub. Before moving to Switzerland, I worked with Signe Normand at Aarhus University in Denmark. I obtained my PhD in 2019 from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where I was supervised by Isla Myers-Smith, Ally Phillimore and Richard Ennos.
Over the past years, I have organised and taken part in multiple expeditions to the Arctic, including the Yukon Territory in Canada, Svalbard (Norway) and Greenland. In the office, I work with spatial and ecological data, statistical models and machine learning.
I am an experienced drone pilot with many flight hours in remote environments. In summer 2018, I helped establish the drone-monitoring programme for the Climate-ecological Observatory for Arctic Tundra (COAT) and I have been an active member of the High Latitude Drone Ecology Network (HiLDEN) since its inception.
I enjoy teaching and communicating science. For many years, I volunteered in environmental education of primary school children and I have co-curated an exhibit at the Edinburgh Science Festival. Throughout my PhD I was tutoring and demonstrating at the University of Edinburgh, including the Geoscience Outreach course, for which I supervised science outreach projects of final year undergraduate students.
[October 2022]
Jakob J Assmann 