Featured papers
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Grassland ecosystems become more resilient with age
Reduced biodiversity affects the stability of the entire ecosystem. A long-term experiment now shows that grassland plant communities with multiple species need about 10 years to adjust to each other and produce an even amount of biomass again.
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Which glaciers are the largest in the world?
_100x604_web.jpg "Malaspina-Seward Glacier in Alaska")
This question is often asked but not easily answered. It depends on how a glacier is defined and on the availability, quality and consistency of digital glacier outlines at a global scale. A joint paper by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center and the World Glacier Monitoring Service now provides the answer.
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Unlocking Environmental Narratives
Newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents and even fiction offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. A new book explores the possibilities and advances in computational analysis of natural language.
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Relationships to nature go both ways – care and attention for nature bring satisfaction and joy for Swiss Alpine farmers
Should we protect nature for its own sake or for people’s sake? In this paper we study a third kind of reason to protect nature – the relationships between people and nature. However, sustaining them requires physical, emotional, and socio-economic resources.
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«Ober mal wett hürate?» oder die Geographie der Schweizerdeutschen Grammatik
Oder würden Sie eher sagen «ober mal hürate wett»? Die räumliche Verteilung grammatikalischer Muster im Schweizerdeutschen untersuchte ein interdisziplinäres Team der Universität Zürich und der EPFL und zeichnete damit die Spuren historischer Migrationen nach.
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Diverse forests outyield monocultures
Multispecies tree plantations are more productive than monocultures, according to a new study carried out in China. GIUZ environmental scientist Bernhard Schmid was involved in the research.
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Drought-exposure history improves recovery of grassland communities from subsequent drought
When a plant community is exposed to drought, the different species undergo evolutionary changes. An international study with GIUZ participation now shows that this leads to improved resilience to future drought stress over time.
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Satellite monitoring of biodiversity moves within reach
Global biodiversity assessments require the collection of data on changes in plant biodiversity on an ongoing basis. Researchers from GIUZ and the University of Montréal have now shown that plant communities can be reliably monitored using imaging spectroscopy.
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Gone with the wind? How small birds move to the wintering grounds
To protect endangered migratory birds, we need to know their flight paths. But some birds are too small to carry a GPS tracker. By combining light, activity and wind measurements, their most likely route can be accurately estimated.
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Choose your own route!
A new navigation system lets pedestrians decide for themselves which route to take in a given area. In this way, they can better acquire spatial knowledge and have a lot of fun during navigation.
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Improving soil health in tropical regions
Healthy soils are key to maintaining ecosystem services provided by agriculture. New organic practices can help, but require incorporating traditional knowledge and the needs of local farmers.
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Climate and soil determine distribution of plant traits
An international team with the participation of researchers from the Institute of Geography succeeded in identifying global factors that explain the diversity of form and function in plants.
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Getting the big picture of biodiversity
Satellites and other remote sensing tools offer new ways to study ecosystems – and maybe even save them. Members of GIUZ and the URPP Global Change and Biodiversity are part of this international, transdisciplinary effort.
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Capturing mood and affective states via Twitter
The coronavirus primarily affects our bodies, but it also has massive impact on our mental health. GIUZ researchers use Twitter content to detect emotional stress related to the COVID-19 pandemic across space and time.
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What If Our History Was Written In Our Grammar?
Humans have been always on the move, creating a complex history of languages and cultural traditions dispersed over the globe. An international team under UZH’s lead has now traced families of related languages over more than 10,000 years by combining data from genetics, linguistics and musicology using novel digital methods.
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Can large volcanic eruptions make glaciers great again?
Large volcanic eruptions were thought to lead to a mass gain and an advance of glaciers worldwide. Whether this could happen again under current climatic changes was investigated by Michael Zemp, glaciologist at GIUZ, and Ben Marzeion, climate scientist at the University of Bremen.
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New model simulates the tsunamis caused by iceberg calving
An international team with the collaboration of GIUZ researchers has developed a new model for simulating both iceberg calving and the tsunamis that are triggered as a result. Their method can help improve hazard assessment in coastal areas.
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Deep forest soils produce greenhouse gases as temperatures climb
Projected climate warming will lead to more soil respiration by microorganisms, releasing even more greenhouse gases. This will further accelerate global warming.
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Global glacier retreat has accelerated
An international research team has shown that almost all the world's glaciers are becoming thinner and losing mass - and that these changes are picking up pace. The analysis is the most comprehensive and accurate of its kind to date.
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1918 Pandemic Second Wave Had Fatal Consequences
In the event of a pandemic, delayed reactions and a decentralized approach by the authorities can lead to longer-lasting, more severe and more fatal consequences. An interdisciplinary team compared the Spanish flu of 1918 and 1919 in the Canton of Bern with the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
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Earlier than expected
Precisely when will the long-lost US aircraft “Dakota” re-emerge from the Gauli Glacier? Radioactive traces from the Cold War now indicate that this will happen soon.
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Locked-in and living delta pathways in the Anthropocene
Deltas have historically been the focus of human development. Some deltas became locked-in, too costly to return to natural states. Researchers conducted a historical analysis on anthropogenic pressures over the past 300 years over 48 deltas world-wide.
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Staying home for nightlife
It’s not just the coronavirus that’s making young people spend their evenings at home. When they are not under the watchful eyes of parents, home can be a place of autonomy and intimacy.
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Directed Species Loss from Species-Rich Forests Strongly Decreases Productivity
At high species richness, directed loss, but not random loss, of tree species strongly decreases forest productivity. Previous studies based on random species loss could therefore bias the predictions of how more realistic extinction scenarios are likely to affect ecosystem functioning.
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Daily Mobility for Healthy Aging
Mobility is one of the key factors for maintaining health up to an old age. Using GPS, individuals' daily-life mobility can be tracked with high resolution in space and time. But how to extract meaningful indicators for the multidimensional nature of mobility?
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Water Towers of the world ranked on vulnerability
Scientists from around the world have assessed the planet's 78 mountain glacier-based water systems and ranked them in order of their importance to adjacent lowland communities, as well as their vulnerability to future environmental and socioeconomic changes.
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Himalayan lakes are exacerbating glacial melt
The rate glaciers are melting in the Himalaya is being significantly accelerated by lakes already formed by glacial retreat, according to recent research conducted at the University of Zurich and the University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK.
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Gaming for better data
Citizen scientists collect large amounts of very valuable data, yet the quality of data is an important issue. The CrowdWater game shows a playful way to improve their accuracy.
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Poor communication torpedoes a second national park
When planning a nature reserve, you have to engage in a subtle art of communication. This failed in the case of the projected Adula Park, as an ethnographic analysis has now proven.
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Black mystery in the Amazon River
Black carbon produced by the burning of fuels and biomass is the most stable carbon compound in nature, yet its path from land to the deep ocean remains mysterious. An international research team under the lead of the Department of Geography characterized the black carbon exported by the Amazon River.
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Find your way back with intelligent navigation systems
Navigation systems are ubiquitous tools, but they make us pay less attention to environment properties and thus we acquire less spatial knowledge. However, intelligent navigation systems can influence human navigation behaviour.
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The emotional entanglements of smartphones in the field
Smartphones as data collection instruments cause emotions. This was one of the results of the interdisciplinary project "Youth@Night". The effect of such emotions calls for a renewed scrutiny of research ethics, particularly as smartphones increasingly become part of research designs.
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From fires to oceans
No life without fire, no light, no culture, and no landscapes. The relics of fire are present in the air, soils, sediments, rivers, and the oceans. A special issue explores the dynamics of fire-derived organic matter in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
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Ice on a stick in soil research
Fertile soils are one of the foundations of life on earth. According to the United Nations, one third has already been lost. Researchers at the Department of Geography have now used a new method to decipher the temporal variations in soil erosion and regeneration over the last 100,000 years in the Sila highlands of southern Italy.
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Melting glaciers causing sea levels to rise at ever greater rates
Melting ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic as well as ice melt from glaciers all over the world are causing sea levels to rise. Glaciers alone lost more than 9,000 billion tons of ice since 1961, raising water levels by 27 millimeters, an international research team under the lead of UZH have now found.
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Do financial incentives motivate farmers to conserve land?
Financial incentives facilitate, but rarely motivate farmers to undertake conservation practices on their land. Instead, their values and relationships are key.
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How landscapes contribute to our well-being
The impact of landscapes on human well-being is manifold: We appreciate the beauty, we feel we belong there, we can relax and promote our health. In five landscapes of national importance in Switzerland, researchers from the universities of Zurich and Lausanne assessed how landscape services are perceived.
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Ice-sheet growing from the base
Freeze-on of water at the ice-sheet bed can explain the occurrence of the large plume-shaped ice-bodies at the base.
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Charcoal: Major Missing Piece in the Global Carbon Cycle
Due to its widespread occurrence and tendency to linger in the environment, black carbon may be one of the keys in predicting and mitigating global climate change. This study is the first to address the flux of black carbon in sediments by rivers on a global scale.
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Extracting mobility patterns from Call Detail Records
Estimating transport demand is one of the key information for city and transport planners. It is determined by origin, destination and time of the day that people move from place to place.
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Mapping functional diversity of forests with remote sensing
Productivity and stability of forest ecosystems strongly depend on the functional diversity of plant communities. Using airborne remote sensing the authors have developed a new method to measure and map functional diversity of forests at different scales – from individual trees to whole communities.
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Unaccompanied minor asylum seekers - feelings of belonging in educational experiences
Drawing on ethnographic research in a center for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers (UAM) in Switzerland the authors explored the educational experiences of these young refuguees.
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The effect of anxiety and spatial abilities in route learning from maps
Differences in the anxiety levels and spatial abilities of individuals affect route learning from a map. In designing maps that work for various contexts and user groups it is important to understand these differences.
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Making Concessions at the Mining Frontier in Burkina Faso
Large-scale mineral extraction projects in the global south fundamentally transform state-society relations in producing countries. Extractive enclaves evolve in the concession areas, in which commercial, traditional and national regulatory regimes entangle.
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New method for analyzing tracking data enables better understanding of behavioral patterns of animals
Using this new tracking technology, it has become possible to record movements of animals and automatically assign behavioral activities such as foraging, resting or flying to the tracking data.
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Who is responsible for negative effects of anthropogenic climate change?
Anthropogenic climate change implies large negative effects on societies, already now and much more so in the future. Who is responsible and how can these responsibilities be considered in the international climate policy?
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Glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains are in balance since the 1970s
In this publication the authors used old US reconnaissance imagery to show that glaciers in the Hunza River basin, in Central Karakoram, experienced on average no significant mass changes also since the 1970s.
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The mega-event syndrome
Mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup have profound effects on the politics, society and economy of the host.
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Historically unprecedented global glacier decline in the early 21st century
The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) has been collecting data on glaciers for more than a century.
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Variability and evolution of global land surface phenology
Land Surface Phenology is the study of seasonal patterns of variation in vegetated land surfaces as observed from remote sensing.
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A literature-based estimation of fire-derived organic matter in soils
Fire-derived organic matter (charcoal-like) is considered to be one of the most persistent groups of compounds in all ecosystems. A large part of it resides in soils for centuries to millennia.
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Neoliberal austerity and the marketisation of elderly care
This paper analyzes a new market of 24 hour home care for elderly people where private agencies hire migrant women from Eastern European countries and sell packaged services to the elderly in Switzerland.
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Institutional shopping for natural resource management in a protected area and indigenous territory in the Bolivian Amazon
Protected area or indigenous territory? Where multiple and sometimes conflicting institutions exist, indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon have to continuously negotiate access to resources.