My name is Astrid, and I am a PhD-student in the Biodiversity section at the Department of Ecoscience, Aarhus University. I have an MSc in biology and a broad interest in biodiversity and ecoinformatics. I am deeply motivated to contribute to the question of how we deal with the challenges we are facing with respect to the current biodiversity crisis. Therefore, I am looking very much forward to deep dive into my recently started PhD-project called: Deep dark diversity. A project that combines the concept of dark diversity and AI-methodology to strengthen our knowledge about community dynamics and expand our toolkit in nature restoration and management. A huge thank you to 15. Juni Fonden for funding the project and to my supervisors Jesper Erenskjold Moeslund and Kevin Kuhlmann Clausen for the opportunity.
As a bit of background, dark diversity, is the shared term for the species present in a site-specific species pool but that are locally absent. In that way, dark diversity represents the potential diversity of a given site at a given time, which can provide valuable insight into the restoration potential and current ecological condition of that site. In my project I aim to develop a set of AI-based models that can can assist decision making when targeting nature management and restoration projects by:

1. Predicting the potential diversity (i.e. dark diversity) for a given site over short and long timespans using sequential simulation.
2. Contributing to our understanding of how species communities develop under different environmental conditions in nature and how community dynamics change over time and in different environments.
3. Provide a basic methodology for using dark diversity as a practical tool in nature management and restoration for targeting potential diversity.
4. Demonstrating the models’ applicability on plant and butterfly communities.

If you are interested in the project, you can contact me on: aha@ecos.au.dk 
You can also read about my previous work with dark diversity here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-023-05351-8