Featured papers
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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.