Internation Sustainability Transitions Conference
Location: Oslo, Norway
16-19 June 2024
Lennart Fischer attended the 15th International Sustainability Transitions Conference in Oslo, Norway, from June 16-19, where he presented recent research on the collectivization of visions of a future bio-based construction sector in the session "The geography of sustainability transitions".
In addition to the conference, he participated in the ERC paper development workshop on June 20, organized by the Network for Early Career Researchers in Sustainability Transitions (NEST) in cooperation with the IST conference, and discussed his current research paper in a session chaired by Anna Bergek.
New Research Associate
Location: Gießen
01. June 2024
We are delighted to announce that Charlotte Lobensteiner will join our team as a research associate from June 1, 2024. As part of the research project, she will be working on her PhD thesis, which will focus on the sustainability transition towards a bioeconomy in Germany. Charlotte Lobensteiner studied Geography at the Leibniz Universität Hannover (B.A.) and Human Geography at the University of Münster (M.Sc.).
European Bamboo Expo
Location: Dortmund
17- 18 May 2024
From May 17 to 18, Tim Becker attended the European Bamboo Expo 2024 to gain in-depth insights into the bamboo industry and conduct short interviews with experts on the global market for bamboo building materials. The theme of the Expo was the central role of bamboo in the circular economy with a focus on the construction sector. In addition to companies and international organizations, industry experts from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe attended the trade fair in Dortmund, Germany.
Presentation: Socio-technical imaginaries of a bio-based construction sector
Location: Online
29. April 2024
Lennart Fischer and Dr. Sebastian Losacker presented two recent research papers on socio-technical imaginaries of a bio-based construction sector at the CIRUS Coffee Break on April 29. The presentation focused on the process of legitimation of imaginaries as well as on recent research results that address the question to what extent imaginaries of a bio-based construction sector compete or complement each other.
CIRUS is the research cluster on sustainability transitions at EAWAG (Water Research Institute of the ETH Domain) and investigates the geography of sustainability transitions.
Presentation at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
Location: Online
26. April 2024
Dr. Sebastian Losacker was invited by TRABBI guest researcher Prof. Dr. Yongmin Shang to give a talk at the Academic Salon of the Institute of Ecology and Sustainable Development of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (China). Under the title "Measuring and mapping innovation in the bioeconomy", Dr. Sebastian Losacker presented recent research on global innovation activities in the bioeconomy and the mapping of regional development paths using sequence analysis.
Location: Online
15. April 2024
Dr. Lukas Kriesch has published a tutorial entitled "Interactive choropleth maps with GeoPandas and Folium" that demonstrates the possibilities of processing and visualizing geospatial data using Python. The tutorial uses the regional bioeconomy dataset as an example to demonstrate the synergy between geospatial analysis and visualization tools in Python. By integrating GeoPandas and Folium, it is possible to create rich, interactive maps that can greatly enhance the presentation and understanding of complex geospatial datasets.
Location: Online
12. April 2024
Bioökonomie.de has published an article on the regionalized dataset on bioeconomy companies in Germany generated by Dr. Lukas Kriesch and Dr. Sebastian Losacker as part of the project. The article reports on the web mining approach using AI technology, the regional implications of the results and the applicability for further bioeconomy research at the regional level.
Copyright: Regional Studies Association
Location: Webinar
11. April 2024
Dr. Sebastian Losacker organized a webinar of the Regional Studies Association entitled "Sustainability Transitions towards a Bioeconomy". The invited speakers were Terese Venus (University of Passau, Germany), head of another BMBF-funded bioeconomy junior research group, with the presentation "The Circular Bioeconomy Transition and Global Biomass Value Chains" and Nicolas Befort (Neoma Business School, France) with the presentation "The Contribution of Epistemic Communities to the Sustainability Transition: The Case of the Wine Industry". The webinar was part of the webinar series "RSA City and Regional Sustainability Transitions", which is co-organized by Dr. Sebastian Losacker.
Copyright: Regional Studies Association
Presentation: Geographical sequence analysis
Location: Webinar
21. March 2024
Dr. Sebastian Losacker gave a presentation on geographical sequence analysis at the webinar "Capturing and Measuring Transformative Knowledge Capacities" of the Research Network on Transformative Knowledge Regions (TRAKR) of the Regional Studies Association. The aim of the presentation was to introduce the method of geographical sequence analysis to economic geography and regional studies. In his talk, he explained how sequence analysis can be used to study transition processes (a detailed introduction can be found in his new article).
Data set on regional bioeconomy in Germany released
09. April 2024
We are delighted to announce the publication of the latest paper by Dr. Sebastian Losacker and Dr. Lukas Kriesch entitled "Bioeconomy firms and where to find them"! In this article, the German bioeconomy was analyzed using advanced NLP techniques and, for the first time, the relative importance of the bioeconomy in different regions was shown using data from over 600,000 company websites. The regional dataset is publicly available (https://osf.io/yvfwh/) and an interactive data explorer on the website can help other researchers to further explore the bioeconomy.
