News
New paper on tree growth patterns published in Ecology Letters
Together with colleagues from WSL, we published a paper in Ecology Letters this week that highlights temporally highly resolved patterns in tree growth. The study shows that increment growth in trees occurs only on a few days in the growing…
Marie Louise Schärer wins best poster award at PSC symposium!
Congratulations to Marie-Loiuse for winning the best poster award at this year's Zurich Basel Plant Science symposium. In her poster, Marie-Louise presented the latest results from her PhD work where she investigates plant physiological and…
Ansgar Kahmen answers questions about the effects of climate change on vegetation in video interview
Following the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Ansgar Kahmen answered questions from the community about the effects of climate change on vegetation in a livestream in the "Ask Our Expert" series on November 8, 2021. Highlights are…
Congratulations to Raphael von Büren for successfully defending his master's thesis on November 10th!
Raphael von Büren has shown that winter frost (due to missing snow cover) and different frost resistance explain the occurrence of Carex curvula and Nardus stricta in the alpine belt. He made an important step to better understand the…
SCCII jib extended to 62.5 m!
The Swiss canopy crane II is now equipped with a longer jib. We extended the original 50 m jib to 62.5 m. With the new jib we have now canopy access to 312 mature trees belonging to 10 different species. We thank Liebherr and the HeliSwiss…PPE in the News!
Our recent publication of using stable oxygen isotope models to counter food fraud (Cueni et al, 2021, Scientific Reports) received substantial media coverage.
Congratulations to Selina Hugger for successfully defending her master's thesis
In her master's project, Selina applied mechanistic stable isotope models to extract physiological information from oxygen isotopes in historic plant samples from a grassland ecosystem. This allowed her to estimate the physiological…
New paper on using stable isotopes to counter food fraud published in Scientific Reports
Florian Cueni led the study with contributions from Dan Nelson and Ansgar Kahmen, which demonstrates the use of stable oxygen isotope models to predict the origin of fruit in Europe. The false geographic declaration of agricultural products…
Team excursion to the SCCII site in Hölstein
Under wonderful weather conditions the PPE group could finally hold their long-awaited team outing to the SCCII site in Hölstein last week.
A new paper in eco-hydrology appeared this week
In the paper we report on a study where we used deuterium labeled water to assess the infiltration of a precipitation event into a temperate forest ecosystem. We found that the label water infiltrated the system rapidly. Also, the trees…
New paper on using machine learning to model oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in precipitation published in PNAS
Dan Nelson led the study with contributions from David Basler and Ansgar Kahmen, which used a new modelling approach based on machine learning to predict monthly oxygen and hydrogen isotope values in precipitation beginning in 1950. Stable…
The Swiss research magazine Horizons published an article on our research at the Swiss Canopy Crane II site in Hölstein
Check out the article and nice photography here.
New paper on plant lipid biosynthesis and hydrogen isotope fractionation published in New Phytologist
Nemiah Ladd led this study with contributions from Dan Nelson, Ansgar Kahmen, and others, which used artificial position specific 13C-labeled pyruvate to track metabolic exchange between cytosolic and plastidial biosynthetic pathways. The…
Image of alpine roots wins SNF prize!
The image shows an astonishing diversity of root structures with different colours, thicknesses, root hairs and branching patterns. This and thousands of other images were captured as part of the 'bel-alp' project that studies root…