Small-scale forest distribution in Mongolia

In Mongolia, forests occur mostly on north-facing slopes. Still, climatic factors also play a big role: northern areas have forests everywhere, while they only occur on a few steep north-facing slopes in the southern parts. The master thesis will use high-resolution DEMs, forest maps and climate data sets to investigate the controlling factors for forest occurrence. It is possible to use GIS only, but programming skills (python, Matlab) are beneficial for this thesis.