Urban Productive Ecosystems (UPE) jobs and careers

About Urban Productive Ecosystems (UPE)

We are an international research team with diverse scientific expertise, backgrounds, and perspectives, united by a shared motivation to understand people, nature, and their interactions in urban and agricultural ecosystems. Our work aims to deepen biodiversity and ecological knowledge, inform evidence-based management, and support the development of multifunctional, climate-resilient landscapes in human-dominated environments. Our research spans a wide range of urban green spaces—such as gardens, parks, ruderal sites, balconies, urban forests, and tree pits—as well as traditional orchard meadows. Across our projects, we integrate ecological and social sciences and collaborate closely with stakeholders, land managers, and local communities. We employ a broad suite of methods to capture both biodiversity patterns and human dimensions, including DNA metabarcoding, vegetation inventories, nutritional and chemical analyses, farmer and stakeholder knowledge, acoustic monitoring, psychological and sociological surveys, and soil measurements. In addition to research, we are actively engaged in outreach and nature education. Through targeted workshops, public events, citizen-science initiatives, and school programs, we work to strengthen ecological awareness and foster connections between people and the environments they inhabit. We are based at the Weihenstephan campus of the Technical University of Munich.