Prof. Dr. Johan Six

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.