Prof. Dr. Johan Six

Prof. Dr.  Johan Six

Prof. Dr. Johan Six

Full Professor at the Department of Environmental Systems Science
Deputy head of Institute of Agricultural Sciences

ETH Zürich

Institut für Agrarwissenschaften

LFH B 1

Universitätstrasse 2

8092 Zürich

Switzerland

Additional information

Research area

 

Professor Six’s research focuses on the feedbacks between agroecosystem management options, biogeochemical cycling, food system functioning and global change. More specifically, his group studies how management affects the complex interactions between soil, plants, and carbon and nutrient fluxes within agroecosystems and its implications for food system functioning within a continuously changing global environment. His group conducts experimental work from the microscale to the landscape scale and subsequently integrates its findings into simulation modeling to underpin the mechanistic bases of the used models, and predict agroecosystem and food system functioning across space and time.

 

Johan Six has been Full Professor of Sustainable Agroecosystems at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences since March 2013.

He was born in Belgium in 1972.

Johan Six studied Soil Science and Tropical Agriculture at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. After that, he conducted his PhD research at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) of Colorado State University. After receiving his PhD in Soil Science in 1998, he remained as a Research Scientist at the NREL until 2002.
In 2002 he took a position as professor at the University of California, Davis, CA.

CV PDF

Additional information

 

Dr. Six is a Chancellor’s Fellow of the University of California, Davis, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, holder of the Philippe Duchaufour Medal of European Geosciences Union, a Distinguished Ecologist of Colorado State University, and recognised as a Highly Cited Researcher in 2015, 2016 and 2017 by Thomson Reuters. In 2019 and 2020, he was recognised as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Group.

 

 

Short Profile

Dr. Six received his PhD in Soil Science in 1998 from Colorado State University. His PhD research was conducted at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL). His PhD research focused on the mechanisms underlying greenhouse gas mitigation by no-tillage practices. Dr. Six remained as a Research Scientist at NREL from 1998 until 2002. He led and was involved in many projects investigating the effect of land use change and management on greenhouse gas fluxes in agricultural, grassland and forest ecosystems. At UC Davis, Dr. Six further developed this line of research with a focus on the feedbacks between ecosystem management options (e.g., tillage, cover cropping, green manuring, sustainable farming, and grazing), global change (e.g., elevated CO2 and climate change), and biogeochemical cycling. More specifically, he studies the complex interactions between soil (e.g, structure, texture and mineralogy), plants (e.g., diversity, nutrient uptake, and root growth), soil biota (e.g. fungi, bacteria, and earthworms), and the carbon and nitrogen cycles in terrestrial ecosystems, especially agroecosystems. His general approach is to conduct experimental work from the micro- to landscape scale and subsequently integrate it with modeling to interpolate and extrapolate it to the regional and global scale. The modeling aims at identifying gaps in our knowledge, generating testable hypotheses, and testing the mechanistic bases of the models. Furthermore, bio-economic modeling is conducted in collaboration with economic and social scientists to holistically assess the sustainability of agriculture. His project sites span from small growers’ fields to intensively-farmed production systems to agricultural research stations. We are involved in a suite of international research projects in Africa, Europe, the US, and Central and South America.
In 2013, he took up a chair position in Sustainable Agroecosystems at ETH Zurich, where he continues his research program developed at UC Davis, but with more of an emphasis on landscape analyses and global Food Security.

Teaching  

Lecture

Agroecosystems I & II
Agroecologists without boarders
Biogeochemical Modeling
Tropical Cropping Systems, Soils, and Livelihoods

Seminars

Global Change Biology
Sustainable Plant Systems

Field Trips and Summer Schools

Interdisciplinary Excursions
Interdisciplinary Project
World Food System Center Summer School “Organic Production Systems”
Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center Summer School “Green Revolution Reloaded”

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