The Director's Research Group aims at understanding terrestrial biogeophysical feedback processes in the Earth's climate system. To this end, our research focusses on the questions of how the interaction between atmosphere, vegetation, land, and ocean has developed in the past and how this interaction causes accelerated changes into new climate and ecosystem states. These topics are addressed by considering palaeoclimate change and exploring possible changes in the future.

Snapshots of simulated global vegetation pattern, so-called biomes, derived from an MPI-ESM model simulation of the last 8000 years (Brovkin et al., 2019)  using a biomisation tool developed in this group (Dallmeyer et al., 2019). Most striking is the widespread vegetation in the Sahara at 6000 BCE. The "Green Sahara Period" ended between 4000 BCE and 2000 BCE, earlier in the north than in the south and earlier in the west than in the east (Dallmeyer et al., 2020). In some regions the expansion of the Sahara occurred rapidly, much faster than the subtle, rather linear change in the forcing of the climate system (Claussen et al., 2017).