News Archive

Wildlife biologist Anouk Taucher is investigating the distribution of wild animals in the city of Zurich as part of a collaboration between the StadtWildTiere project, WSL and ETH Zurich. She is comparing traditional methods such as camera traps and wildlife observations made by the public with newly developed environmental DNA monitoring in order to understand where squirrels, hedgehogs and other wild animals are found in the city.  

Madagascar is home to over 11,000 plant species, 80 percent of which are found nowhere else on Earth. A recent study by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and ETH Zurich has put forward a new hypothesis for the underlying cause of Madagascar's rich plant biodiversity, which has been regarded as an unsolved mystery of natural history.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are everywhere and their regulation is complex. Their persistence should be considered a direct component of chemical hazard, writes Martin Scheringer in an editorial in the journal Science. Martin Scheringer is a lecturer at the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences (D-USYS) at ETH Zurich and Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.

After 10 years as an observer, Switzerland has become a full member of the Integrated Carbon Observation System ICOS, an European-wide greenhouse gas research infrastructure.

Soil biodiversity is crucial for a healthy soil, which is critical for a healthy society. But how can that insight be translated into effective policy on soil? The European Union is currently preparing the first ever piece of international legislation to protect soil health. In Science, a group of scientists of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative (GSBI), including Johan Six from ETH Zurich, outline some of the challenges the new law will face.

With increasing burdens of micro- and nanoplastics cycling through the atmosphere, the potential of how these particles could affect cloud formation processes is addressed. The atmospheric conditions and plastics properties whereby these particles could act as cloud condensation nuclei or ice nucleating particles in clouds are assessed.

Nina Buchmann, Professor of Grassland Sciences at ETH Zurich, has ranked 5 in Switzerland in the 2022 "Ranking of Top 1000 Female Scientists in the World" by research.com.

Synthetic models of tropical cyclones (TCs) are a vital tool for TC risk assessment. They are specifically designed to overcome the spatial and temporal limitations imposed by historical TC data. A recent study presents the first global model intercomparison of four synthetic TC datasets in the impact space.

Planting trees has become a trendy carbon offsetting activity. However, large-scale forestation projects may alter the Earth’s energy balance, affecting both global atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns, suggests a modelling study published in Nature Communications.

The Swiss Polar Institute is collaborating with offshore sailing team Oliver Heer Ocean Racing to collect environmental data during their 2024 Vendée Globe Campaign. The science campaign is led by Nicolas Gruber (ETH Zurich), Thomas Frölicher (University of Bern) and Samuel Jaccard (University of Lausanne) and will carry out a data collection during both the training and racing phases of the Vendée Globe challenge between 2023 and 2025.

The Federal Council appointed Christof Appenzeller as director of the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology at its meeting on 7 September. Mr Appenzeller will take up his post on 1 January 2023, succeeding Peter Binder who will retire at the end of the year.

In summer, the peak in atmospheric elemental mercury originates from mercury emission trapped in snow and sea ice and not from river inputs to the Arctic Ocean. This is suggested by a new study lead by Stefan Osterwalder (ETH Zurich) and Jeroen Sonke (Université de Toulouse) and co-authored by an international team of researchers investigating mercury isotope signatures in arctic rivers, ocean and atmosphere.

At its meeting on 13 July, the ETH Board approved a total of ten "Joint Initiatives" on the Strategic Area of "Energy, Climate and Environmental Sustainability" and on "Engagement and Dialogue with Society". Six of them come from the Department of Environmental Systems Science (D-USYS).

A collaboration between the Animal Genomics group at ETH Zurich and the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (USDA-ARS) investigated which methods of sequencing and assembling produce high-quality bovine genomes, how pangenomes robustly combine such assemblies, and how these new resources reveal hitherto inaccessible trait-associated DNA variants.