PSC Discovery Workshops: Drivers of photosynthesis

Context

The future summer climate is expected to be warmer and drier, and extreme events such as heavy rainfall and droughts are likely to be more frequent. These will be big challenges for local agriculture to deal with.

Within the PSC Discovery Program for Youth, an inquiry-based learning workshop for secondary school classes has been developed that aimed to provide insight into gas exchange between crop plants and the atmosphere under short-term extreme conditions.

Objectives

Hands-on experiments to explore the carbon uptake of single crop plants after environmental disturbances will be compared with real-time measurements of gas exchange over a crop field. How do atmosphere, vegetation and soil interact in terms of carbon fluxes? What affects CO₂ concentration in the field? How is CO₂ flux measured over vegetation? Short- and long-term effects of climate change at plant and ecosystem levels and their implications for agricultural production and practice will be discussed.

PSC Discovery Program for Youth

The external page PSC Discovery Program for Youth is a science and education program that addresses secondary school classes and aims to illustrate cutting-edge plant research to inspire young people for plant sciences as well as showing its direct link to their everyday life. Workshops are developed with scientists from the Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center together with a team of science communicators and educators, and experts in school curriculum.

The Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center (PSC) is a competence center linking and supporting the plant science research community of the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich and the University of Basel.

The program was funded by SNSF Agora.