News
Find all our news from previous years in our News Archive.
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March
Together with the technicians Thomas Baur and Philip Meier, doctoral student Nick Wright-Osment established a new sub-canopy flux tower at the Lägeren forest site for the ABACOS project. This new tower measures carbonyl sulfide (COS) flux beneath the canopy, allowing us to better understand the role of soil and understory vegetation in ecosystem COS cycling. (19 March 2026)
Urban trees under the laser! Sophie Emberger recently completed an intensive field campaign for the UrbaNature project in collaboration with the external page Urban Ecosystem Science group from TU Berlin. Working alongside external page Alex Plakias and Master's student Timon Eggenberg, she combined 3D laser scans with our ecophysiological and micrometeorological measurements of 85 monitored trees. We are excited to see how these structural insights pair with our data on urban tree water use! (3-6 March 2026)
What a perfect spring day for a winter event! The group gathered for a fun competition in four rounds. The event started with a minigolf tournament in the external page Hardgut Brache. The uncommon and creative course was an amusing challenge – more for some, less for others. After we were done at the minigolf court, we moved indoors where the competition continued. Tasks included building a tower with spaghetti and mashmallows (unsurprisingly, the techs performed really well), guessing travel distances of the team, and a paper plane competition. Hidden talents were discovered. Once the prizes were handed over, the group enjoyed some snacks and drinks to close of the great informal gathering. Thanks very much for organizing, Flavian and Morten! (3 March 2026)
Congratulations to Yi Wang and her co-authors for getting their paper entitled "Drivers of long-term grassland CO2 fluxes: effects of management and meteorological conditions during regrowth periods" chosen as a "highlight paper" external page in Biogeosciences. This acknowledgement echoes the praise received by the reviewers. Although external page Reviewer no. 2 does not always have a good reputation, for this paper, we really appreciated Reviewer’s 2 insightful comments: critical, constructive, and fair. Particularly this feedback, which came in just before Christmas, made us feel proud: “I wish the authors excellent scientific recognition of their work, which, as said in the first review, may well be developing as a model analysis for long-term CO2 exchanges between managed ecosystems and the atmosphere.” What a big compliment by an experienced expert in the field. Thank you! (2 March 2026)
February
This year's LERNfeld course took place in beautiful spring weather. The young researchers received an introduction to the environmental education program and their role as coaches and role models for young people. Practical exercises included a learning activity on determining the ecotypes of earthworms. In the next months, the participants will accompany school classes on small research projects on farms, giving an introduction into the topic and providing advice and practical support from formulating hypotheses to interpreting the collected data. The course was led by Sabina Keller and held together with lecturers from partner organizations. (26 February 2026)
We warmly welcome Henriikka Vekuri to the Grassland Sciences group. Henriikka joins us as a postdoc for the next two years. Welcome and have a good start, Henriikka! (2 February 2026)
Each year in January, we submit the "AAA", ETH's Annual Academic Achievement report. And here are the achievements of our group from the past year 2025:
- 302 students taught during 2025,
- 302 grades given in 2025,
- 3 Bachelor's and Master's theses finished in 2025,
- 10 active doctoral students (by the end of the year),
- 3 doctoral theses finished in 2025,
- a large number of publications ... 43, many written with colleagues from all over the globe.
- 91% of our papers have been published in open access journals (Gold OA) or are open access (Hybrid OA). To increase the open access, we also uploaded postprints to the ETH Research Collection (Green OA). The result: 93% of our journal publications from 2025 are openly available to everybody.
Thanks to everybody, what a great team!! (31 January 2026)
Peter Ravelhofer, Martin Rüegg, Eric Brouwer, and Nick Wright-Osment went to a rainy Lägeren to set up a sonic anemometer at a potential second sub-canopy eddy flux site. We will monitor wind at the location over the next couple of weeks to determine if the location is suitable. If the wind profile of the site aligns with our objectives, we will connect the station to the MIRO gas analyzer and begin monitoring sub-canopy carbonyl sulfide fluxes for the ABACOS project. (29 January 2026)
The annual external page TreeNet meeting took place in Basel this time. Nina Buchmann presented newest results about "How atmospheric dryness shapes the global forest carbon sink", external page Capucine Marion talked about "Dissolved gases in tree sap as new eco-hydrological tracers". Many group members attended. (13 January 2026)
The demand for open-access ecosystem data from Swiss FluxNet reached an all-time high in the past year. Our newest download statistics show that researchers and the public downloaded 11'087 datasets in 2025 (which equals to more than 30 downloads per day on average), representing an increase of 33% compared to 2024. Interest was well-distributed across sites and increased by 18% or more compared to 2024 for all sites. In total, our data have been downloaded 45'872 times between Nov. 2016 and Dec. 2025.
This increase in downloads confirms our group's believe that environmental data should be a public good. Therefore, we openly share our datasets with the global community under the generous Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (external page CC-BY 4.0) license. By providing our datasets via open access through international networks like external page FLUXNET and external page ICOS, Swiss FluxNet ensures that local environmental insights contribute directly to global efforts in climate modeling, environmental policy and transparent scientific reproduction. (12 January 2026)
The isotope community came together at the Stable Isotope Meeting external page STING26 at the University of Bern hosted by the external page group of Eliza Harris. Lorenz Allemann presented his first N2O isotope results from the maize cropping season 2025 and received an early career scientist award for his presentation. Congratulations, Lorenz! (6-8 January 2026)
Happy New Year! The Grassland Sciences group wishes you the very best for 2026! We are looking forward to another exciting year with new projects, new colleagues, new collaborations, and new results. We will continue our efforts of bringing science, education, and outreach together, collectively with many colleagues, students, school kids, and the public. Find out about our 2025 activities in our News Archive. (1 January 2026)