Lothar Schulte studied Geography, Geology and Economic History at the Univ. Düsseldorf and Univ. Cologne, and obtained his Ph.D. in 2000 at the Univ. of Barcelona. His thesis on Quaternary landscape evolution received the national award on Quaternary Science and Geomorphology. In 2000 he was contracted by the University of Barcelona as Assistant Professor giving lectures in Natural Hazards, Geomorphology, Global change, etc. Between 2001 and 2002, he was Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoc fellow and Lecturer at the University of Bern. In 2006, he was appointed Associate Professor and, in 2017, Full-Professor. Since 2006, he has acted as Principal Investigator of the PaleoRisk Research Group. In 2011 and 2019, he received the ICREA Academy Award. Since 2008, he has participated in the evaluation processes of the DFG 806 CRC, DFG SPP 2361, DFG, AEI, AQU, and FWO. Since 2018, he is coordinator of the Floods Working Group of the international network Past Global Changes (PAGES).
Research interests
L.S. has developed a multidisciplinary approach integrating multi-archive datasets into a 4-D time-space model of past floods, environments and societal impacts in mountain landscapes. In generating centennial-long reference flood records for the Alps, New Zealand’s Alps and the Iberian Peninsula, documentary sources, floodplain and lake sediments and their geochemical variability were analysed; floods levels were reconstructed from tree rings, lichens, historical buildings, hydraulic infrastructure, and archaeological sites; and, this evidence was calibrated for a given reference period in relation to climatological and hydrological data. Analyses of atmospheric variability, reconstruction of the paleoclimate and deciphering of the historical interactions between society and river environments, shed light on the forcing of floods. Preindustrial climate periods were also examined to understand changes in environmental systems and flood dynamics under the effects of Global Warming.
Keywords
Geography, Global Change, natural hazards and societal impact, floods, human-environment interaction, Climate Change, mountain environments, geoarchaeology