Interdisciplinary Master's thesis topics

Different communities and cultures show distinct conceptualizations of the environment. (Pascual et al., 2021; Kong and Purves, 2024). A marker to delimit different cultures is language: different languages do not linguistically refer to landscape in the same way (Purves et al., 2023). The other way around, there are reasons to believe that regional cultural values are expressed through languages. This Master’s Thesis aims to analyse this in the case of Switzerland.
The thesis is part of a bigger project called People’s Place in Nature. In this project, we are interested in unlocking different relations that Swiss people develop with their natural environment and in understanding why specific natural entities matter to us – or not. The recently developed concept of relational values (Himes and Muraca, 2018; Deplazes Zemp and Chapman, 2020; Pratson, Adams and Gould, 2023) defines environmental values as very personal, contextual and cultural. In my PhD, which is part of this big project, I launched a survey in which I collected, amongst others, Swiss birdwatchers’ micronarratives (about 500 small texts about birdwatching exeriences in French and German). 
Your specific task would be to analyse these texts with a inductive-deductive computational linguistics methods (see e.g. (Purves, 2022; Purves et al., 2023; Baer et al., 2024; Komossa, Kong and Purves, 2024). Bridging the concept of environemtal relational values and methodologies of sociolinguistics, you will help me unlock how languages influence the conceptualization of nature, biodiversity and birds in Switzerland.
As a second step a qualitative analysis of selected texts and photographs (that many participants optionally uploaded to illustrate their birdwatching stories) will be conducted. 

If you are interested and would like to get more information, please contact me: zelie.stauffer@uzh.ch

Cited literature:

Baer, M.F. et al. (2024) ‘Extracting sensory experiences and cultural ecosystem services from actively crowdsourced descriptions of everyday lived landscapes’, Ecosystems and People, 20(1), p. 2331761. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2024.2331761.
Deplazes Zemp, A. and Chapman, M. (2020) ‘The ABCs of Relational Values: Environmental Values That Include Aspects of Both Intrinsic and Instrumental Valuing’, Environmental Values, 30. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3197/096327120X15973379803726.
Himes, A. and Muraca, B. (2018) ‘Relational values: the key to pluralistic valuation of ecosystem services’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 35, pp. 1–7. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.09.005.
Komossa, F., Kong, I. and Purves, R.S. (2024) ‘What’s in the news? A multiscalar text analysis approach to exploring news media discourses for managing protected areas in Switzerland’, Landscape Research, 49(6), pp. 823–850. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2024.2358234.
Kong, I. and Purves, R.S. (2024) ‘Locality and transferability: examining pre-built lexicons to elicit landscape values from natural language’, AGILE: GIScience Series, 5(5), pp. 1–6. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5194/agile-giss-5-33-2024.
Pascual, U. et al. (2021) ‘Biodiversity and the challenge of pluralism’, Nature Sustainability, 4. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00694-7.
Pratson, D.F., Adams, N. and Gould, R.K. (2023) ‘Relational values of nature in empirical research: A systematic review’, People and Nature, 5(5), pp. 1464–1479. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10512.
Purves, R. (2022) Unlocking Environmental Narratives, Ubiquity Press. Ubiquity Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5334/bcs.
Purves, R.S. et al. (2023) ‘Conceptualizing Landscapes Through Language: The Role of Native Language and Expertise in the Representation of Waterbody Related Terms’, Topics in Cognitive Science, 15(3), pp. 560–583. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12652.

The Museum Cerny in Bern – a unique worldwide collection of arctic art (https://mcca.ch/) – contains a legacy of photographs from Greenland, which have not yet been scientifically analysed, especially for glacier research and reconstruction. The photos were taken by Urs Stoller, who worked as a helicopter pilot in Greenland for decades, from 1974 to 2010 in the entire coastal area of Greenland. This also includes 16 GEUS summer expeditions, which enabled him to document many less accessible areas.

The entire photo collection comprises around 3000 images, including around 100 glacier photos, some of which can be viewed at: https://db.museumcerny.ch/index.php?form-inuit-search=stoller&form-inuit-group=objects

More information about the Master Thesis Topic (PDF, 3 MB)

Supervision from the GIUZ: Dr Samuel Nussbaumer & Dr Jacqueline Bannwart

Two interdisciplinary MSc projects are available as part of a PhD project at the Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETZ Zurich.

Project 1: Relationship between tick hazard (where ticks are the most abundant) and tick exposure (where people hang out the most)

Project 2: What is the role of birds as tick hosts?

More ...

Supervision from the GIUZ: to be determined.

Understanding coupled social-ecological systems requires an in-depth analysis of both the social and the ecological systems, and their interactions and feedbacks. Despite this recognized need, in practice this means that to answer questions related to social-ecological feedbacks requires double the amount of information, data and makes it harder for individual students to conduct it to a satisfactory level. Here we propose a coupled approach to a Masters' thesis. More... (PDF, 59 KB)

Maria J. Santos, Norman Backhaus
Earth System Science; Space, Nature & Society

Landscapes containing water bodies are often considered as especially attractive. This master thesis will in a first step analyse literature discussing this fact. Based on this knowledge examples of different kinds of landscapes with and without water bodies shall be identified and and in a third step tested with test persons in the Eye Moving Lab. The detailed setup of this research will be established with the Master student at the beginning of the thesis.

Norman Backhaus, Ilja van Meerveld
Space, Nature & Society, Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis, Hydrology and Climate

Ross Purves, Norman Backhaus
Geocomputation, Space, Nature & Society

Andreas Vieli, Ross Purves
Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics, Geocomputation

Andreas Vieli, Ilja van Meerveld
Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics, Hydrology and Climate