Successful doctoral thesis defense by Josepha Schiller

On December 8th, Josepha Schiller successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Understanding Cross-Scale Diversification in Agricultural Landscapes” at BTU Cottbus.

Her study asked, “How do landscape patterns and farmers’ decisions interact and how can AI help us understand these relationships in a transparent way?” over three years. Using explainable AI (XAI), her work detects patterns and generates hypotheses about how different forms of diversity co-occur – and where trade-offs emerge – in agricultural landscapes. In particular It revealed a diversity trade-off between landscape complexity and spatiotemporal crop diversity in Brandenburg, Germany. ⁠The study was conducted under the Integrated Priority Project (IPP) “CrossDiv - Co-Designing Smart, Resilient, Sustainable Agricultural Landscapes with Cross-Scale Diversification”.