Dr. Werner Kutsch is Director General of ICOS since March 2014. He is biologist, plant ecologist and ecosystem scientist by education and has worked on ecosystem carbon cycling for 25 years in Europe and Africa. The focus of his work has been for a long time in the comparison of ecosystems after land use change and integrating complex landscapes. He has worked at the Ecosystem Research Centre of University of Kiel, at CSIR in Pretoria, at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena and at Thünen, the Federal Research Institute for Rural Areas, Forestry and Fisheries in Braunschweig.
ICOS is an ESFRI Landmark Research Infrastructure and a legal entity (ERIC) since November 2015. As Director General, Dr. Kutsch is the legal representative and overall coordinator of the Research Infrastructure and currently managing the final internal integration of ICOS. This work comprises internal organisation of the operations of the distributed observational networks and central facilities, on optimizing the internal data flow between the different observational programs of ICOS, on developing the data platform of ICOS (‘Carbon Portal’) which will also serve as an interface to COPERNICUS and GEOSS, and on deepening the cooperation with other RIs. Dr. Kutsch is experienced in data acquisition, post-processing, data analysis and modeling of ecosystem carbon budgets. Integrating ICOS-internal data streams and fostering usage of ICOS RI data for GHG modeling are some of his main goals for the next years. Furthermore, he is very interested in further developing data citation systems.
He is responsible for the external representation of ICOS ERIC and currently leading the development of its future strategy. ICOS aims to be part of European and global integration initiatives that that support the usage of in situ observations for improving the national inventories on greenhouse gases.