We congratulate Janet Mumo Mutuku, who currently is a doctoral student at ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, on winning second place in the “Best Poster Awards” at the 2026 iDiv Conference. The 10th iDiv Conference took place from September 8 – 9 at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. As part of the event, the three best talks by early-career researchers as well as the three best posters in the field of biodiversity research received an award.

About the Poster

The poster with which Janet won the award focused on her PhD project: “Machine Learning Approaches for Understanding Vegetation Structure and Cloud Response Dynamics.”

In her project she investigates how vegetation structure and land cover relate to cloud behaviour under different land-atmosphere coupling conditions. It aims to understand how land-use practices, climate, and atmospheric conditions influence ecosystems and biodiversity. Therefore it combines multiple satellite, meteorological, and vegetation datasets to identify low clouds that are coupled or decoupled from the land surface. Janets current work focuses on southern Germany, where coupled-regime forest-cloud effects are contrasting rather than uniform. It examines how cloud occurrence and properties vary with forest type, canopy structure, and landscape configuration. At the same time, it assesses the reliability and spatial representativeness of the coupling classification.

Find a comprehensive project description on her project page in the Earth and Environmental Sciences topic area.

Abou the conference

The annual conference of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) brings together biodiversity researchers across career stages and consortium locations to discuss research areas like biodiversity change, ecosystem functioning, and society.