Interdisciplinary Master's thesis topics
The effect of woodland expansion on ticks and associated Lyme disease risk in the Scottish Highlands
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?
Supervision from the GIUZ: to be determined.
Paired masters theses: Understanding coupled social-ecological systems
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
Water landscapes: Attention and preferences
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
The WGMS Glacier App as Teaching Tool
Michael Zemp, Sara Landolt
Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics, Geography Teacher Training
Seeing the world through social media: bottom-up qualitative descriptions of biodiversity test sites
Ross Purves, Norman Backhaus
Geocomputation, Space, Nature & Society
Opportunities for geomorphological and glaciological research from the Arctic-wide high resolution ArcticDEM
Andreas Vieli, Ross Purves
Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics, Geocomputation
What can oxygen isotopes tells us about the origin and genesis of rock glacier ice?
Andreas Vieli, Ilja van Meerveld
Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics, Hydrology and Climate