Staff profile

Katharina is an agricultural geographer and geo-ecologist interested in multidisciplinary research to understand interactions between the atmosphere, biosphere and human societies of relevance for agricultural systems. She has been trained as a physical geographer and climate change impact scientist and earned MSc and PhD degrees from the universities of Leipzig and Potsdam in Germany and moved to Australia in 2014.

Katharina is a team leader in the Global Food and Nutrition Security group at CSIRO. Her two areas of interest are: climate change impacts on agriculture and adaptation, and the geography, structure and evolution of agricultural systems. Geographers are interested in anything affecting the spatial patterns of the Earth’s surface and for her, the most interesting drivers are global change and human development.

Core methods and tools that she develops and/or deploys are process-based cropping systems modelling, spatial analysis with GIS and R, scenario analysis, social science methods, uncertainty analysis, data integration and multi-scale analysis. Her recent research aims at contributing to a better understanding of the relationship between agricultural diversification and food security and the importance of multiple cropping for food production.

Selected recent publications

Waha K, van Wijk MT, See L, Fritz S, Thornton PK, Wichern J, Herrero M (2018) Agricultural diversification as an important strategy for achieving food security in Africa. Global Change Biology, 24, 8: 3390-3400.

Ramankutty N, Mehrabi Z, Waha K, Jarvis L, Kremen C, Herrero M, Rieseberg LH (2018) Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security. Annual Review of Plant Biology, 29;69:789-815

Two most cited publications

Waha K, Müller C, Bondeau A, Dietrich JP, Kurukulasuriya P, Heinke J, Lotze-Campen H (2013): Adaptation to climate change through the choice of cropping system and sowing date in sub-Saharan Africa. Global Environmental Change, 23, 1: 130-143.

Waha K & van Bussel LGJ (equal contribution), Müller C, Bondeau A (2012): Climate-driven simulation of global crop sowing dates. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 12, 2: 247-259