Sebastian Schmidtlein

Prof. Sebastian Schmidtlein serves as Deputy Spokesperson for the **Ecosystems** research topic at the KIT Climate and Environment Center. He is affiliated with the **Institute of Geography and Geoecology (IFGG)** at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. His work focuses on advancing remote sensing and geoinformatics methodologies to study ecological and environmental systems, with particular emphasis on vegetation dynamics, climate change impacts, and biodiversity conservation.

Research interests include:

• Remote sensing applications in vegetation ecology
• LiDAR and hyperspectral data analysis
• Ecological modeling of plant traits and species distributions
• Climate change effects on ecosystems
• Invasive species monitoring
• Forest biomass estimation and carbon stock assessments

Recent work highlights the use of machine learning and CNNs for predicting forage quality, quantifying wildfire fuels, and mapping plant species distributions. His team develops innovative tools like the rasterdiv R package for spatial heterogeneity analysis and DIARS for invasive species detection. Collaborations include interdisciplinary projects on climate policy advocacy and ecosystem service quantification.

Notable contributions include pioneering studies on phylogenetic approaches to species assemblage prediction and the integration of citizen science in plant trait analysis. His research bridges ecological theory with practical applications in environmental monitoring and conservation planning.