2011

Congratulations to Rebecca Hiller to the successful defense of her dissertation shortly before Christmas.

Talks & posters of this years contributions to the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco:

• Kahmen A, Hoffmann B, Schefuss E, Arndt SK, Cemusak LA, West JB, Sachse D Download Leaf water enrichment in deuterium shapes leaf wax n-alkene δD values of terrestrial plants (PDF, 3.1 MB).
• Kutsch WL, Merbold L, Archibald S (09.12.2011) Download Seasonal changes of water carbon relations in savanna ecosystems (PDF, 9.3 MB).
• Wolf S, Eugster W, Buchmann N (09.12.2011) Seasonal variability of CO₂ and H₂O fluxes in tropical pasture and afforestation. (invited)
• Wolf S, Merbold L, Eugster W, Ammann C, Buchmann N (06.12.2011) Download Impact of spring drought on ecosystem carbon and water dynamics in Switzerland (PDF, 2.3 MB).
  

The COST ES0804 ABBA CoreGroup Meeting took place at ETH Zurich the 1^st of December 2011.

Congratulations to Matti Barthel to the successful defense of his dissertation and enjoy jumping out of a plane.

Rebecca Hiller and Johanna Spiegel presented results from their PhD research at this years Swiss Geoscience Meeting: Hiller et al. (talk): external page "Regional scale methane emissions derived from concentration gradient measurements along the Reuss Valley, Switzerland."; Spiegel et al. (poster): external page "Does long-range transported African Dust affect cloud droplet size distributions in a Tropical Montane Cloud Forest in Puerto Rico?"

"Native Trees Clean the Air of Carbon Dioxide, Pastures Pollute" is the headline of the latest article from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The article is based on findings from Sebastian Wolf's (now @ UC Berkeley) PhD Thesis.

"Wissenschaft im Gespräch" a broadcast from Radio DRS on Werner Eugster's fascination about fog (fog research), together with the literature-expert Thoms Feitknecht.

Lutz Merbold gave a talk on "The impacts of climate change on ecosystem carbon stocks" during the expert workshop on "Ecosystem climate relevance beyond forests and peatland" on the island Vilm, Baltic Sea.

Ansgar Kahmen was entitled Assistant Professor in September. He will lead the Physiological Plant Ecology group. See ETH life

All lectures from the recent summer school on "Flux measurements: methods, sensors, databases and modeling" funded by COST ES0804 ABBA are now available online.

Matthias Haeni, Rebecca Hiller and Jacqueline Stieger were participants of the TTorch Summer School funded by the European Science foundation. The school was organized in three sections: (1)Atmospheric composition, (2) Atmospheric measurements and (3) Atmospheric modeling. The given lectures can be accessed online here. >>

Sämi Schmid gave a talk during the 12^th Congress of the European Ecological Federation (EEF) which took place from the 26t^th to the 29^th of September in Avila, Spain. Download Download his talk (PDF, 876 KB)

Sämi Schmid attended the Mountain Research Initiative Key Contact Workshop in Avila Spain the 25^th of September 2011.

From 26^th to 29^th of September Nina Buchmann, Susanne Burri, Anna Gilgen and Sabina Keller were at the external page CARBO-Extreme annual meeting in Montpellier, France. Results from the experiments simulating summer drought at Chamau and Früebüel were presented in sessions reporting from the ecosystem manipulation experiments (WP2).

Sebastian Wolf presented parts of his PhD Thesis during the 3^rd iLEAPS Science Conference in Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany.

Also the Swiss television SF1 was interested in our project FasMeF investigating the regional methane budget. See the external page short video of the Einstein show, starring Jacqueline Stieger and Dennis Imer.

"Winter CO₂ fluxes in a sub-alpine grassland in relation to snow cover, radiation and temperature" is the title of the latest manuscript accepted at Biogeochemistry authored by Lutz Merbold et al..

Sebastian Wolf et al. latest publication on "differences in evapotranspiration between pasture and tropical afforestation" will be published soon in Ecosystems.

An article about the FasMeF project was published in the St. Galler Tagblatt.

Matti Barthel's latest publication entitled "The diel imprint of leaf metabolism in the δ13C signal of soil respiration und control and drought conditions" is now available external page online.

The research on methane in the lower atmosphere by balloon and aircraft measurements currently undertaken by Werner Eugster and Jaqueline Stieger is highlighted in ETH Life.

Lutz Merbold contributed to our latest external page open access publication on the impacts of charcoal production in miombo woodlands in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sebastian Wolf and his research on the "neglected CO₂ source" in Panama during his PhD thesis are highlighted in ETH Life.

Matti Barthel et al. gave a talk entitled "The carbon flow through the atmosphere-plant-soil system under drought" at the 96^th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, TX, USA.

The Mercator Foundation Switzerland supports the recently founded centre of excellence "World Food Systems" headed by Prof. Nina Buchmann at ETH Zurich. Read the article in ETH Life.

Sebastian Wolf successfully applied for a SNF PostDoctoral fellowship. The project “Validation of theory-based ecosystem flux partitioning approach using correlation analysis of high-frequency time series with long-term dataset from a Californian oak-savanna” will take place in the lab of Dennis Baldocchi at UC Berkeley (CA, USA).

Ansgar Kahmen successfully applied for an ERC Starting Grant. With the ERC funded project COSIWAX, Ansgar and his team seek to establish the hydrogen isotope composition of leaf wax n-alkanes as a novel tool to assess plant and ecosystem water relations across new spatial and temporal scales.

Sebastian Wolf gave a Download talk (PDF, 927 KB) about his research in Panama within the "Geographisches Kolloquium" at the Technical University in Dresden.

Ambrose H Makoi and other fellowship students met their donator Samih Sawiris for lunch last week. An article on the different PhD projects was published in ETH Life.

Lutz Merbold became chair of the COST action ES0804 (ABBA) - "Advancing the integrated monitoring of trace gas exchange Between Biosphere and Atmosphere".

Werner Eugster and Sebastian Wolf are coauthors of a recent publication in Remote Sensing of Environment - "Relating the X-band opacity of a tropical tree canopy to sapflow, rain interception and dew formation".

"Strong seasonal variations in net ecosystem CO₂ exchange of a tropical pasture and afforestation in Panama" is the title of our newest publication in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology by Sebastian Wolf et al.

19.04.2011: The majority of our group attended the 12^th Swiss Global Change Day in Bern. The following posters were presented by our group:

• Johanna Spiegel - Download "Does the isotopic signal in cloud droplets only depend on the condensation fractionation?" (PDF, 745 KB)
• Rebecca Hiller - "Aircraft-based methane flux estimates for an agriculturally dominated valley in Switzerland"
• Dennis Imer - "Download Seasonal variation of CO₂, CH₄ and N₂ fluxes on three grasslands along an altitudinal gradient" (PDF, 13.8 MB)
• Samuel Schmid - Download "Impact of experimentally induced summer drought on biomass in alpine grassland" (PDF, 460 KB)

Our latest paper on "Leaf wax n-alkane δD values are determined early in the ontogeny of Populus trichocarpa leaves when grown under controlled environmental conditions" by Ansgar Kahmen et al. was accepted at Plant, Cell and Environment

Werner Eugster, Download Albin Hammerle (PDF, 40 KB), Download Rebecca Hiller (PDF, 42 KB), Download Dennis Imer (PDF, 46 KB), Download Lutz Merbold (PDF, 35 KB) and Download Patrick Sturm (PDF, 46 KB) contributed to the external page European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2011 in Vienna, 3^rd-8^th of April.

Ansgar Kahmen and Ulrich Prechsl gave talks at the BASIN Meeting - Download "The Roles of Stable Isotopes in Water Cycle Research" (PDF, 93 KB), Keystone, Colorado.

Nina Buchman, Dennis Imer, Lutz Merbold and Sebastian Wolf attended the GHG-Europe Annual Meeting in Braunschweig, Germany.

An article about the PhD project of Hermegast A Makoi was published in the Download Perspectives of the North-South Centre (PDF, 208 KB)the 21^st of March.

The latest publication on "Metabolic fluxes, carbon isotope fractionation and respiration - lessons to be learned from plant biochemistry" by Roland Werner et al. was accepted today and will be available online soon.

An article about the research being done at the Laegeren research site was published in ETH Life. The Terrestrial Ecosystem Physiology group at ETH headed by Alexander Knohl collaborates closely with our group. Another article was published in the most recent Issue of Download ETH Globe (PDF, 3 MB).

Johanna Spiegel gave a talk on Download "Measuring cloud droplets: one step towards a better understanding of clouds" (PDF, 212 KB) at the 75^th Annual Meeting of the DPG and DPG Spring Meeting in Dresden.

Lutz Merbold gave a presentation on our latest findings on Download "Water fluxes across African ecosystems" (PDF, 247 KB) at the external page 9th Savanna Science Network Meeting in Skukuza, Kruger National Park, South Africa. For more information click here. >>

Matthias Häni started his PhD in February. His thesis is part of the SNSF ProDoc research module , focussing on eddy covariance flux measurements of carbon dioxide and water in two forest ecosystem (Lägeren and Davos).

Ansgar Kahmen was the lead author of the most recent article, published in the Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences - PNAS, on external page "Cellulose δ¹⁸O being an index of leaf-to-air vapor pressure difference (VPD) in tropical plants".

Our newest external page Open Access publication on "Spatial and temporal heterogeneity of carbon fluxes in miombo woodlands" is now available online.

Doerte Bachmann attended a Technical Meeting in Nijmegen (NL) to plan further Tracer Experiments within The Jena Experiment.

Hermegast Ambrose Makoi received a Sawiris Scholarship - Science & Technology for the South and started his PhD thesis in our group January 15th. His research will focus on Monitoring forest carbon stocks in miombo woodlands in Western Tanzania.

With the start of 2011 we are now part of the Institute for Agricultural Sciences (IAS).