News

external page TreeNet, the biological drought and growth indicator network in Switzerland, with dendrometers also at our field sites Lägeren and Davos, organized their Annual Meeting and celebrated a highly successful year. Nina Buchmann was invited to talk about “Ecosystem greenhouse gas fluxes in a changing climate” (12 November 2024)

Many group members participated in the external page 22^nd Swiss Geoscience Meeting (SGM) in Basel. Nina Buchmann co-convened the “Urban Environments and Climate Change” session. The urban session was offered for the first time ever at the SGM, drawing a high attendance and active participation from the audience. Iris Feigenwinter co-convened the “Atmospheric Composition and Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions” session. Sophie Emberger gave a talk about her research in the UrbaNature project on hydraulic strategies of urban trees, and Kukka-Maaria Kohonen talked about carbonyl sulfide (COS) fluxes in an urban environment. Stefan Osterwalder presented his work on dynamics of gaseous elemental mercury concentrations in Switzerland. Luana Krebs presented a poster about long term CO₂ exchange in Davos, and Marius Floriancic one on forest litter and deadwood and their impact on forest water cycles. Fabio Turco and Lorenz Allemann presented posters from their work on N₂O emission from the cropland within the DONA project. It was a wonderful opportunity to share our interesting results, discuss scientific findings with colleagues, and also enjoy the nice weather and Herbstmesse in Basel. (8-9 November 2024)

What a big day for external page ICOS Switzerland and the team in Basel: The Basel station has officially been awarded the label of an ICOS Associated Ecosystem Station! Basel is among external page eight stations that received the ICOS label at this year’s ICOS General Assembly.

external page Basel station (264 m a.s.l.) is located in the city center of Basel and has one of the longest urban CO₂ flux records worldwide (permanently operated since 2004). We are extremely happy about our third official ICOS station in the ICOS-CH network. Congratulations to the Basel team around station PI external page Christian Feigenwinter, and also to our former group member external page Prof. Mana Gharun whose station Amstvenn in Germany got labelled as well! (6 November 2024)

Prof. Ankit Shekhar, we are proud of you: a farewell apero for our colleague Dr. Ankit Shekhar. (4 November 2024)

In our group, we believe that collaboration and sharing data advance science. That’s why we make our data available open access. Hence, we uploaded flux and meteo data from all our sites until 2023 to FLUXNET. The new versions of the FLUXNET datasets are now available. Check out the different sites:

• external page CH-AWS (2006-2023)
• external page CH-CHA (2005-2023)
• CH-DAV:
  • external page FLUXNET (1997-2020)
  • external page ICOS (2019-2023)
• external page CH-FRU (2005-2023)
• external page CH-LAE (2004-2023)
• external page CH-OE2 (2004-2023)

(28 October 2024)

David Millar, a external page FLUXNET visitor from UC Berkeley (now at Cornell University), visited ETH Zurich beginning of this year. Among the many things he did during his visit in Switzerland was also a trip to our Swiss FluxNet site Chamau. David has written a blog post about his experience. Have a look at the “external page Productive collaborations and alpine adventures in Switzerland”. (9 October 2024)

Our grassland site Früebüel has an intriguing past. Valeria Wieser, a journalist from Zentralplus, visited the site and learned about its past and present. She has now published two articles about Früebüel. Find out about the external page past use of Früebüel and the external page current work done at this external page AgroVet-Strickhof site, including the Swiss FluxNet measurements of our group (in German). (29 September 2024)

The external page St. Gallische Naturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft NWG organises each semester a lecture series, this winter series is about "Was die Welt bewegt: Von Stoff- und Energieflüssen". Nina Buchmann opened the series with a talk about „Motor des Lebens: Die Bedeutung des Stickstoff-Kreislaufs für unseren Planeten“. Find the pdf external page here (25 September 2024)

 

Cities and global warming, a very tight relationship. In the most recent external page ProClim Flash Newsletter No. 79, the doctoral students of our project UrbaNature describe these relationships in an article about "Wie urbanes Grün die Hitze reduziert". (19 September 2024)

The external page ReClean consortium, one of the ETH-domain wide joint research initiatives, invited Nina Buchmann to give a talk in their seminar series on “Tight coupling of C & N biogeochemistry: Expected and unexpected results from forests and agroecosystems”. Watch the recording external page here (17 September 2024)

The Swiss citizen are asked to vote regularly on different topics, e.g., on the biodiversity initiative. Nina Buchmann was asked by external page DeFacto, a web platform which makes scientific expertise accessible to a wider audience. The question was: external page What would be the consequences the adoption of the biodiversity initiative would have for Switzerland? (17 September 2024)  

What a great start into the working day! One of the new members of the Grassland Sciences group, Marius Floriancic, gave a morning tour around the WaldLab Forest Experimental Site showing how they monitor the quantity and chemical composition of water fluxes across the forest water cycle. Thank you for the interesting tour and we are looking forward to a fruitful collaboration! (17 September 2014)

Many group members participated in the external page ICOS Science Conference in Versailles, France. Iris Feigenwinter gave a talk on N₂O fluxes and production processes under different grassland management practices from the SUPER-G project, Kukka-Maaria Kohonen presented results on winter snowpack and CO₂ fluxes at Alp Weissenstein, and Yi Wang presented a poster about long-term CO₂ fluxes from the Chamau grassland. It was a wonderful opportunity to share our research with an international audience and discuss scientific findings with colleagues. The conference ended with an extraordinary excursion on a balloon flight in Paris, where the greenhouse gas concentration gradient is measured as part of the external page ICOS-Cities project. Check out the external page list with other contributions of ICOS-CH members. (9-13 September 2024)

This year's external page ICOS Switzerland Annual Meeting, organized by ICOS-CH coordinator Susanne Burri, was hosted by the University of Bern. The external page agenda of the full-day meeting was a mix of administrative and scientific presentations. Susanne Burri updated the ICOS-CH consortium about ICOS-CH, ICOS RI and ICOS Communications, Nina Buchmann (ICOS-CH Focal Point) led a discussion on doing Impact Assessment for ICOS-CH, and Iris Feigenwinter (ICOS Station PI for Davos) presented news from the Davos station and the Ecosystem Community. Moreover, Nina Buchmann gave a scientific talk about 26 years of net ecosystem CO₂ exchange in Davos, where the scientific analysis is led by Luana Krebs. After an inspiring day in Bern, we are already looking forward to the ICOS-CH Annual Meeting 2025 to take place at WSL in Birmensdorf. (3 September 2024)

A warm welcome to Yu Zhou who joins our group as a postdoc. Yu will work in the CERES project. (4 September 2024)

Our technician Philip Meier joined the first external page Summer School “Assessment of Tropical Forest and Soil Resources” in Fort Portal, Uganda. Together with Joseph Okello (Mountains of the Moon University, Fort Portal) and workshop leader (and former member of our group) Mana Gharun (Universität Münster), Philip was co-teaching the workshop “Measuring in-situ greenhouse gas fluxes across land-use systems”. Extremely motivated students from East Africa and Europe learned how to conduct measurements with three different types of soil flux chambers. Among others, also a low-cost chamber of our late colleague Werner Eugster was used. (19-24 August 2024)

The Director General of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) visited ETH Zurich to discuss innovation and collaboration for sustainable food systems. And Nina Buchmann introduced the varied activities of the Word Food System Center. (22 August 2024)

The new Ranking of Top 1000 Female Scientists in the World is out. Nina Buchmann has been ranked sixth external page in Switzerland. Have a look at the external page global ranking to find out who else made it among the top 1000 female scientists. (21 August 2024)

Good research data management is very important in our daily work. Our group has been committed to this for a long time,  even before Open Research Data were at the top of the agenda of many institutions (e.g., the external page ETH Board or external page swissuniversities).  Our data manager, Sabina Keller, is now also acting as Data Steward within the ETH-wide network. Find out more about data stewardship at ETH Zurich. (20 August 2024)

The external page International Federation of Agricultural Journalists held its annual meeting in Interlaken. Nina Buchmann and external page Eva Reinhard (Agroscope) were asked to talk about research and innovation in their respective institutions (15 min each ...) and if external page science meets the expectations of society. Both said: Yes! (15 August 2024)

A group of 19 participants from the external page ECOSENSE project at University of Freiburg (Germany) visited the Davos external page ICOS Class 1 Ecosystem Station. Iris Feigenwinter, ICOS Davos station PI, gave them a tour around the station and explained the greenhouse gas and meteorological measurements at the forest floor and the 35 m tower. In the air-conditioned hut, the visitors could have a look at the data loggers and cabling, the fancy-valve switching system, and the online near real-time data visualization. Many questions were asked, and it was a pleasure to have such an interested and motivated group of scientists around!(31 July 2024)

Sometimes vacation time is also the time to visit field sites of former PhD exchange students. ;-) In 2022, external page Davide Andreatta had joined our group for an exchange. In 2024, Nina Buchmann had the chance to visit one of the Trentino flux sites, the Lavarone site. Wonderful fir, beech, spruce forest with an unusual understory plant. (29 July 2024)

After the publication come the downloads and the citations. The paper from external page Sophia Etzold et al. (2022) on "Number of growth days and not timing of the growth period determines radial stem growth of temperate trees" in external page Ecology Letters is top in both: it was one of the most downloaded articles in 2021, and now it is a "Top Cited Article 2022-2023". Congrats Sophia! (12 July 2024)

Long-term, year-round forest-floor greenhouse gas fluxes are rare. At Davos, we used automated chambers to measure CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O fluxes over four years. The study is now published by Luana Krebs et al.: "external page Forest-floor respiration, N₂O, and CH₄ fluxes in a subalpine spruce forest: Drivers and annual budgets." This is Luana’s first-ever paper as the lead author, giving us all the more reason to celebrate with an apéro and enjoy homemade ice cream on the sunny roof terrace. (4 July 2024)

We tried it again, and this time it worked: we attended a guided tour by external page Grünstadt Zürich on "Cool the city". Last year, it was simply too hot ;-). We saw many different aspects of trees in the city, how to secure their water supply, how to bring plant diversity back into downtown, and how to juggle the many different pressures on city green within Zurich. (2 July 2024)  

DONA and the Nitrogen friends – No, this is not a band's name, but the title of a workshop we coorganized together with colleagues from Agroscope. The aim: get to know what is going on in terms of research on N in the various DONA subprojects as well as further past and current projects in our group, at Agroscope and beyond. N₂O fluxes, nitrate leaching, new sensors, precision farming, the topics were diverse, the discussions lively. To be repeated! (26 June 2024)

This year’s external page N Workshop took place at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. The perfect occasion to present the DONA project. On Monday, Fabio Turco opened the session of N losses with a talk about N₂O emissions in a Swiss cropland. He presented a novel approach to N₂O driver analysis using machine learning. On Friday, Lorenz Allemann presented a poster with his framework to upscale N₂O emissions from field to farm. The latest findings were presented, and contacts were made - in the best conditions on the university's green campus and in unusually sunny Danish weather. (17-21 June 2024)

The Ecohydrology summer school organized by ETH Zurich and EPFL was a great success. Doctoral and Master’s students from all over the world came to Switzerland to learn about ecohydrology. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the students were invited to ETH Zurich to learn about water isotopes (at the WaldLab) and eddy covariance fluxes. Nina Buchmann gave a lecture on carbon and water fluxes measured within Swiss FluxNet, followed by an excursion with Liliana Scapucci at the new Hönggerberg site. During the visit, the students were challenged to use our flux "fingerprints" as detectives, a fun way to learn about fluxes of different ecosystems in response to weather and management. The major outcome for us? Seeing the students engaged and enthusiastic about our research and teaching! (19 June 2024)

The European grassland community met for the 30^th General Meeting of the external page European Grassland Federation (EGF) in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Of course, our group could not miss that. Valentin Klaus presented a keynote on his work at Agroscope entitled "What information is needed for upscaling grassland ecosystem services to landscape scale?". Nina Buchmann was also invited for a keynote entitled "The long path from data collection to sustainable grassland management" summarizing findings from the SUPER-G project. InsuranceGrass doctoral student Yi Wang gave a talk on her literature review entitled "Ecosystem services of temperate grasslands under climatic extremes: a literature review". As always, the EGF crowd was very enthusiastic to learn more about grasslands and to meet each other. (9-13 June 2024)

In the frame of the Study Week ("Studienwoche") for high school students interested in studying Agricultural Sciences (3 to 7 June 2024), various workshops were held to depict the diversity of Agricultural Sciences. Nina Buchmann welcomed the students and provided an input into research topics and methods in Agricultural Sciences. Our group contributed with a half-day workshop on agriculture and climate change. After an input on drought research by Anna K. Gilgen, the students could test different hypotheses in a field experiment on a meadow and compare drought plots with flooded and control plots. The workshop was organized by Sabina Keller and the study week was designed by Regine Maier. To be repeated in the coming years. (4 June 2024)

Although we are sad to see him leave our group, we are also very proud of Dr. Ankit Shekhar, who joined the Indian Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor today. Ankit first became part of our group in 2015 as an intern and then came back as a doctoral student end of 2019, defended his thesis in June last year, and stayed on as a postdoc before he got appointed Assistant Professor in his home university. Congratulations, Ankit!!! (16 May 2024)

Eddy Mercury has migrated from a boreal peatland in Sweden to the Baltic Sea where it continues measuring the net surface-atmosphere exchange of gaseous elemental mercury (Hg⁰). Stefan Osterwalder and Philip Meier together with colleagues from SLU Umea and Uppsala University have installed Eddy Mercury on the external page islet Östergarnsholm located east of Gotland. The main objective of the project is to measure diel patterns and seasonal dynamics of the air-sea Hg⁰ exchange and use the data to constrain the wind speed dependence of the transfer velocity (kHg⁰). Eddy Mercury stays on Östergarnsholm until October 2024. Many thanks to everyone who supported the field trip! (3 May 2024)

It seems to be ranking time... Research.com just published the latest external page global ranking for the discipline Ecology and Evolution. Nina Buchmann is ranked #131 among the Best Scientists for 2024 globally, is ranked #4 in external page Switzerland, with rank #1 for female scientists in Switzerland. Only six women were ranked for the TOP100 in Switzerland. What is going on?? (30 April 2024)

Rankings, we can love them, we can hate them. But: They simply exist. In the latest external page ranking of plant scientists within the German speaking research area (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), Zurich turned out to be the most successful city for plant scientists within the TOP30. Nina Buchmann ranked 8^th, the first of only two women in the TOP30. As the publisher wrote "It is quite surprising that the highly cited field of plant research is so clearly male-dominated." We can only agree! (24 April 2024)

Ever wanted to know what permanent grassland is, where it is located, how it is managed, and what ecosystem services it provides across Europe? The SUPER-G project has now made available an Atlas which aims at exactly this. It distinguishes 18 different permanent grassland types, and provides a short portrait for each, illustrated with case studies. Maps and photos complement each portrait. Check it out on the external page project page. (13 April 2024)

The first quarter of the year is over, time for some statistics (no, this is no April Fools' Day joke): between the release of the FLUXNET2015 data set in November 2016 and end of 2023, our Swiss FluxNet data have been downloaded 26 805 times. Imagine - that's about 280 times per month. Open Science, we call this. Thanks to Lukas Hörtnagl, putting this together! (1 April 2024)

The Grassland Sciences group has been committed to open science for a very long time. We upload postprints of all our non open access publications since 2017 and we are sharing our data openly. This sounds easier than it is. It's a long way from data collection to FAIR data sharing. Read Nina Buchmann's thoughts about it in the newest Plant Science Center Download newsletter (PDF, 2.3 MB). (20 March 2024)

Project members in the InsuranceGrass project (from ETH Zurich, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)) met for a two-day project meeting in Leipzig. They updated each other on the progress of their work packages and discussed their findings and challenges. Ideas and plans for joint papers, webinars, and further collaborations were exchanged. Looking forward to the next meeting! (14/15 March 2024)

After the German and Romansh speaking parts of Switzerland, the Grassland Sciences group now also has a station in the French speaking part. Salut les romand∙es! A fully equipped eddy station was installed in the village of Forel near Lausanne. As part of Lorenz Allemann's DONA project, we will measure CO₂, N₂O and CH₄ fluxes over a whole crop rotation, starting with temporary grassland, followed by maize and winter wheat. And as if the new station wasn't enough, we've also installed a small soil station on an additional field with the aim of scaling up the N₂O emissions to multiple fields. A big thank you to Martin Rüegg who planned and built the station himself, and the team members Sophie Emberger, Philip Meier and Sambit Shome who helped with the installation! (7 March 2024)

Are you interested to check recent meteo and flux data from our grassland, cropland, and forest sites? No problem. :-) The visualization of our Swiss FluxNet data by Grafana is now open access! Get an overview of all stations or check out the special dashboard for the ICOS site Davos. (26 February 2024)

Research equipment in urban areas is more obvious to the general public than at more remote sites. And so it happened that journalist Martin Huber from Tagesanzeiger wanted to explain the function of the white boxes that are fastened to some trees in Zurich. The white boxes are actually the setup for sapflow measurements within external page ICOS Cities. In the article published in Tagesanzeiger today, UrbaNature doctoral student Sophie Emberger explains why studying the response of urban trees to the warming climate is important, and how sapflow measurements contribute to the understanding of the ecophysiology of urban trees. Find out more in the external page article or download the Download pdf (PDF, 1003 KB) (both in German). (23 February 2024)

The traditional winter group event, organized by Sabina Keller, took us to a curling hall. Two teams first got an introduction and then we were on our own, trying to get the stones into the house, elegantly, sweeping the way ... harder done than said ... During the apero, we could celebrate and watch the others, experts and newcomers. To be repeated! (2 February 2024)

The external page GAW/GCOS Switzerland National Coordination Meeting took place in Bern this year. We presented our first project results from „Feedbacks between vegetation, carbon, energy, and water cycles in the urban environment (UrbaNature)”. (1 February 2024)

January is also the month of reporting, including the "AAA", ETH's Annual Academic Achievement report. And here are the achievements of our group in the past year 2023:

• 333 students taught in 590 semester hours during 2023,
• 302 grades given in 2023,
• 3 Bachelor and Master theses finished in 2023,
  
• 11 active doctoral students (by the end of the year),
• 3 doctoral students finished in 2023,
• a large number of publications ... 44. Out of the 39 journal articles, many have been written with very large consortia.
• 68% of these 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: 86% of our publications from 2023 are openly available to everybody!

Thanks to a great team!!

This week, we welcomed two classes from the Technische Berufsmaturitätsschule Zug for our workshop On the traces of stable isotopes from grass to milk. In addition to insight into our research area, the students visited the stable isotope mass spectrometer lab and produced milk powder in the laboratory for analysis. Thanks to our group members Anna, Annika, Martin, Sophie, and Lorenz for their contributions, and to Sabina Keller for organizing and leading the workshop! (31 January 2024)

A new eddy site! Our technicians built up a new tower at external page Waldlabor on Hönggerberg. The tower setup differs from the installations we use at our other sites. As the forest at Waldlabor is still young, the tower is designed to grow with the forest. The beam can be lowered and raised with a cable pull, and additional tower elements allow easy adjustments of the tower height. Additionally, this tower does not have mains power and is run with a fuel cell and solar panels. We are excited to see the first results come in. (22 January 2024)

In the course of his sabbatical in Hawaiʻi in 2022, Philip Meier got permission to place two weather stations in the Puʻuwaʻawaʻa Forest Reserve, a site of the Hawai‘i Experimental Tropical Forest (external page HETF) to conduct an experiment in a lava tube opening. Lava tube openings are topographical features and unique ecosystems. They can provide shelter to plant species that are otherwise not found in the surrounding environments. In his project, Philip investigated a selected lava tube opening in the Puʻuwaʻawaʻa Forest Reserve by micrometeorological means. One entrance to that tube was covered by verdant ferns which did not occur elsewhere in the area. Philip placed two small weather stations, measuring air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, solar radiation, soil moisture, wind speed, and direction in the lava tube opening and in the surrounding area, respectively, in May and June 2022. With the acquired meteorological data, Philip gained insight into the conditions which may help explain the observed differences in the vegetation. Now, Philip got invited to present the collected data and preliminary results of his small field study in the HETF January Webinar. Check out Philip’s contribution to the HETF webinar series on external page YouTube. (17 January 2024)

Almost one year into our project UrbaNature, we organized a workshop on “Urban biosphere-atmosphere interactions in a changing climate”, bringing together about 40 scientists, urban planners and city practitioners. The aim of the workshop was to strengthen the collaboration between the groups working at similar fields. Outcomes of the workshop were bilateral meetings on data and methods as well as on further collaborations, the conclusion that such a highly interactive workshop were to be repeated annually, with changing topics. More to come, stay tuned! (10 January 2024)

Happy New Year! The Grassland Sciences group wishes you the very best for 2024! We are looking forward to another year full of exciting research, interesting encounters with students, colleagues, and the public. Find out what we did last year in our News Archive. (1 January 2024)