dr. JA (Julian) Helfenstein

Addressing global environmental challenges requires bringing together different scientific disciplines and stakeholders from outside academia. That is why my research and education focuses on building bridges between scientific disciplines and non-academic stakeholders to find real-world solutions. I am specialized both in soil science and land system science (the study of land use as a socio-ecological system)

I joined the SGL group in November 2022 after three years as a postdoctoral researcher at Agroscope, Switzerland. I received my PhD in 2019 from ETH Zürich.

My research as a soil scientist has focused on nutrient cycling in soils, working on exciting and relevant topics from analyzing how soil properties affect human malnutrition in central India, to developing a novel method to estimate soil phosphorus turnover, and thus allowing for the improved representation of the phosphorus cycle in global land surface models. As a land use scientist, I developed an assessment framework to predict trends of ecosystem services at the regional-national level, and have analyzed changes in land use intensity and impacts on farmer livelihoods across Europe. Since 2021 I am also a scientific advisor and member of the board of Honesta, a farmer-led initiative for developing biodiversity-friendly farming systems. My future research will bring these themes together by investigating the interplay of agricultural land use intensity and soil quality across spatial and temporal scales to co-create agricultural systems that meet the demands of tomorrow.