I am an early-career scientist interested in the impacts of global change on the terrestrial Arctic and their role in the Earth’s system.
My research combines field observations, spatial ecology and remote sensing to help us better understand changes in tundra landscapes, including vegetation change and plant diversity.
From a theoretical perspective, I am particularly interested in how observational scales influence the inferences that we can make about processes and phenomena in complex ecological systems.
Currently, you can find me at the University of Zürich in Switzerland, where I am the principal investigator on the “tundra eDNA” project (Swiss Polar Institute Exploratory Grant) and work as a Senior Research Associate with Gabriela Schaepman-Strub.
Before moving to Switzerland, I worked as a postdoc with Signe Normand at Aarhus University in Denmark (2019-2022). 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 fieldwork trips to the Arctic, including Nunavut and 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 active in the High Latitude Drone Ecology Network (HiLDEN) since its inception.
I enjoy teaching and communicating science (click here for more detail). For many years, I volunteered in environmental education for primary school children and I have co-curated an exhibit at the Edinburgh Science Festival. At the University of Edinburgh, I was an instructor on the Geoscience Outreach course, for which I supervised science outreach projects of final year undergraduate students. Currently, I am teaching spatial ecology, remote sensing and programming in the context of the biodiversity programme at the University of Zurich.
When not at work, I enjoy making bread and being outdoors. Currently, my favourites activities are running, stand up paddle boarding and road biking.
[December 2024]
Photos courtesy of Sandra Angers-Blondin (top) and Debora Obrist (bottom)
Jakob J Assmann 