Former members
Postdoctoral researchers
Alex Skeels
Alex looks at the evolution of spatial biodiversity gradients in a range of study systems at regional and global scales. His research combines approaches from community ecology, macroecology and macroevolution to better understand how ecological and evolutionary processes interact over deep-time scales to shape the uneven distribution of species in the present-day. With the Landscape Ecology Group, Alex will develop process-based simulation models of diversification and geographic range evolution to identify the key mechanisms shaping diversity patterns in complex systems.
Hsi-Cheng Ho
Hsi-Cheng's interest lies at the intersection of animal behavior and community ecology. Particularly, he is curious about how behavioral effects could scale-up to determine community-level ecological phenomena. He is currently focusing on resolving community structure, functional traits, and trophic networks across spatially-coupled blue-green ecosystems. This project is built on existing datasets collected by plenty of Eawag and WSL researchers, and is supervised by Prof. Altermatt and Prof. Pellissier.
Lydian Boschman
Lydian investigates the role of plate tectonically driven habitat changes on biodiversity. Her research focuses on the plate tectonic and paleogeographic history of plate boundary zones - the highly dynamic and tectonically complex areas on Earth with major changes in landscape throughout geological time. The aim of her research is to reconstruct these changes of two case study areas, the Andes and the Caribbean, and to provide a better understanding of the effect of these changes on modern biodiversity patterns.
Kristiina Visakorpi
Kristiina studies how temperature, competition and herbivory affect carbon assimilation and allocation by alpine plants. Her work is built around a transplant experiment on Swiss Alps. By measuring different aspects of plant physiology in the field, she investigates the mechanisms determining competitive outcomes and species distributional ranges in alpine plant communities.
Marc Grünig
Marc investigates the possible impact of harmful invasive insect pests under future climate change scenarios. He develops species distribution models to predict the current distribution of insect pests and to project their future habitat suitability in Europe. Further he develops tools to inform on the risk of occurrence and the potential damage of the study species to fruit crops in Switzerland that will help decision makers to develop novel crop protection strategies.
Ian McFadden
Ian studies the processes that create spatial structure and diversity in species assemblages at both local and macro scales, with a focus on plants. He is particularly interested in how current and past environments, and plant-animal interactions such as seed dispersal combine to shape biodiversity patterns. To do this he integrates spatial process models, functional trait information and phylogenetic comparative methods. He holds a joint position between the Landscape Ecology group at ETH and the groups of Catherine Graham and Niklaus Zimmermann at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL.
Charles Novaes de Santana
Charles investigates biodiversity dynamics over space and time, integrating geology, climate and eco-evolutionary processes. He analyzes large scale biodiversity data contributes to the built of mechanistic models using concepts of complex systems, artificial intelligence, and agent based models.
Loïc Chalmandrier
Phd students
Wilhelmine Bach
Wilhelmine’s research is focused on integrated mechanisms that have shaped biodiversity gradients of mammals, birds and amphibians globally. Hypotheses on the origin of biodiversity will be coupled with landscape dynamics to unravel large spatial patterns, such as the latitudinal diversity gradient. She will integrate ecological and evolutionary mechanisms with paleo-environmental reconstructions to simulate species distribution within a process-based model and compare them to extant biodiversity patterns.
Corina Maurer
Corina’s PhD project focuses on plant-pollinator networks in agro-ecosystems. In one part of the project, she investigates which types of semi-natural habitats are most important to sustain a diverse wild bee community in agricultural landscapes. In a second part, she looks at how floral resource availability, land use and plant-pollinator network structure influence the prevalence of honeybee viruses in wild bees and syrphids. For this, she sampled pollinators and their visited flowers along insect-flower visitation transects in different landscapes in the Swiss lowlands. The project is part of the VOODOO-project together with European partners and is conducted at Agroscope Reckenholz together with Dr. Matthias Albrecht.
Thomas Keggin
Thomas is interested in the generation of diversity in an eco-evolutionary context. In particular, functional diversity at all levels of biological organisation. To attempt to learn more about these dynamics he is helping to develop and validate a process based model of marine biodiversity against population- and phylo-genomic data collected from various coral reefs.
Victor Boussange
Victor is exploring the evolutionary mechanisms that are at the core of emergent patterns in Complex Adaptive Systems. He tries to understand to what extent such mechanisms are universal, using rigorous mathematical analysis combined with the use of numerical models. His approach is data-driven, and aims at studying genetics, ecological, socio-cultural and economic systems through the binding lens of Complexity Sciences.
Esteban Guevara
Esteban investigates the effects that human-induced disturbance have on ecological interactions, such as those occurring among hummingbirds and their food plants. This mutualistic relationship is widely observed in the tropical Andes and is the basis of pollination for hundreds of plants. He will use network and trait-based approaches combined with field experiments to understand changes in network structure, functional diversity and hummingbird behavior in habitats affected by human activity. His dissertation is co-supervised by Dr. Catherine Graham at WSL.
Lisha Lyu
Lisha is working on the mechanisms behind the extant distribution patterns of global plants. Combining distribution data, phylogenetic data and functional data of more than 20 angiosperm families with the macroevolutionary mechanistic models, Lisha is trying to reconstruct the historical eco-evolutionary processes that lead to the modern biodiversity patterns.
Joan Casanelles
Joan's PhD aims to study the effect of connectivity of urban green areas. He focuses on cavity-nesting bees and wasps. He uses data obtained from trap nests from urban parks together with functional traits of insects to investigate the effect of different urban landscapes on host-parasite networks. His project is part of the project BioVEINS and is conducted at the WSL together with Dr. Marco Moretti and Dr. Martin Obrist.
Antonia Clara Klöcker
Antonia’s PhD investigates spatio-temporal trajectories of biodiversity recovery following anthropogenic disturbances. Based on functional and compositional data she will model biodiversity recovery dynamics across different ecoregions and taxa. As part of the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Programme between the ETH and the European Research Center (JRC) she aims to bridge approaches in macroecology and life cycle impact assessment to facilitate science-to-policy communication in the context of global biodiversity loss and habitat degradation. At ETH, her project is affiliated with the group of Ecological Systems Design lead by Prof. Stefanie Hellweg.
Felix Neff
Felix investigates the effects of land-use on interactions between plants and insect herbivores and the consequences for ecosystem functioning. He uses field monitoring data from forest and grassland communities along land-use intensity gradients and combines this with data on functional traits of plants and insects. The goal is to better understand the consequences of land-use on trait-based interaction networks and community-based ecosystem processes such as herbivory or biomass production. His project is part of the Biodiversity Exploratories in Germany (main supervisor Dr. Martin Gossner).
Oskar Hagen
Oskar investigates the role of past environmental conditions together with eco-evolutionary feedbacks in shaping biodiversity gradients. Oskar develops macroevolutionary mechanistic models inferring biodiversity patterns from historical environmental dynamics. The spatial diversification model will provide an important novel approach to better understand the processes of speciation and extinction, at the origin of biodiversity gradients.
Elena Haeler
Elena investigates the effect of habitat amount and connectivity on biodiversity in forests. In a multispecies approach, she studies saproxylic beetles, fungi, mosses and lichen and how the species communities are influenced by dead wood and forest structures. The results should lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of species in maturing forests.
Camille Pitteloud
Camille investigates the ecological mechanisms shaping interactions between plants and insect herbivores along elevation gradients in the Alps. She uses genetic barcoding to reconstruct interaction networks and couples trophic regime with measured ecological traits. Her goal is to provide a better understanding of the structure of plant-insect interaction networks toward more realistic forecasts of community responses to global changes.
Giulia Donati
Giulia investigates the ecological and evolutionnary drivers the shaping spatial variation in biodiversity in coral reefs. Her work combines phylogenetic analyses, morphological measurement and population genetics. She integrates this knowledge toward modelling the builiding of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity on coral reefs.
Patrice Descombes
Patrice investigates the potential impact of an increase in insect herbivory on alpine grasslands under climate change. He investigates the resistance of plant communities to herbivore along elevation. He set-up a large field experiment along elevation in the Alps to quantify the effect of insect translocation on plant community structure. The goal is to better understand the temporal dynamic of alpine community responses to climate change.
Gitte Høj Jensen
Invited PhD students
Ao Luo
Ao investigates the global biodiversity pattern, determinate and conservation in flowering plants. He synthesizes multi-faceted biodiversity patterns including taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity to assess their conservation status under current protected areas. Furthermore, He aims to provide high-resolution range maps of global flowering plants at species level to help the preservation of the diverse complex plant life on our planet. His research is supervised by Prof. Loic Pelissier (ETH Zurich) and Prof. Zhiheng Wang (Peking University).
Zhiying Han
Zhiying is interested in predicting forest changes under climate change in the future in Jirisan national park, South Korea. In order to better understand the rule of forest succession and track the driving force of forest dynamic change, the forest landscape model is used to simulate the effect of climate change on tree species under various scenarios over the next 100 years. Through comparative analysis of the impact of climate change and disturbance (e.g. forest fire) on forest landscape dynamics, the species, scale, and distribution of forest resources in Jirisan can be adjusted reasonably so that the forest resources in Jirisan can play a better ecological function and economic benefits. Zhiying's research is co-supervised by Prof. Loic Pelissier (ETH Zurich) and Prof. Hyeyeong Choe (Seoul National University).
Scientific staff
Michel Schmidlin
Michel believes in the transformative power of environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis as a tool to gather biodiversity data efficiently, helping to better protect the world’s living organisms. As part of the CRISPeD team, he is involved in developing a novel molecular method for fast, robust and inexpensive detection of species employing CRISPR-Cas technology. He hopes this technology will play a part in enabling people to better care for their environment, especially in places with less financial resources.
Kevin Keyaert
Kevin is coordinating and developing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on environmental DNA (eDNA) that will be made available on the EdX platform as an ETH Zürich MOOC. The project involves creating visual and textual materials for a hybrid and online learning experience based on the latest eDNA research, including from the ELE group. The course offers a general and global audience of learners a comprehensive understanding of eDNA, its workflow and applications within the context of conservation and the biodiversity sciences. Kevin has an interest and background in environmental science communication, as well as in science and technology studies, to inform how emerging scientific innovations and practices are portrayed and illustrated for non-specialist audiences.
Benjamin Flück
Benjamin is the group's resident software engineer. He provides engineering support for both soft- and hardware to various projects within the group.
Vera Weichlinger
Vera prepares the input data for paleoclimate simulations of different time steps within the Cenozoic Era. With her background in Climate Science, she is part of an interdisciplinary research project that aims to study the interplay among the fields of Geodynamics, Climate and Biodiversity throughout geological time.
Eilish Richards
Eilish is working to establish and optimize a genetic reference database for marine species using the 12s mitochondrial DNA marker. She is interested in the ability of the marker to distinguish between and within genera as well as the effectiveness of different primers to amplify target regions. The reference database will be used to identify species detected using the non-invasive approach of eDNA metabarcoding. The results of this project will provide insight into what marine areas and specific organisms may need closer monitoring.
Interns
Adeline Bonaglia
Adeline's work is part of the main project MaLeFix and has the focus on the biodiversity aspect. She will use eDNA metabarcoding to measure fish biodiversity in a selection of sites in Swiss rivers, and will apply a physiological model based on water temperature forecasts to predict the risk associated with extreme temperatures for the species detected. The physiological model developed will allow the creation of spatial risk maps. The final idea is to provide a tool to help stakeholders be aware a few weeks in advance of extreme events and react accordingly to mitigate the problem by implementing preventive measures (e.g., removing fish from the mainstem, increasing the depth of tributaries to ensure more cold water inflow).
Kerstin Niedermaier
Kerstin is an intern in collaboration with AXA climate with the goal of using eDNA to quantify biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Her master's degree focused on forest ecology, specifically studying how disturbance impacts carbon sequestration in forests, but her overarching interest in science is in finding ways to apply research in the Real World, whether that be understanding how farmers can foster high biodiversity within their farming practices, how forest management can impact carbon sequestration, and beyond!
Chenyu Shen
In her internship, Chenyu works on the MaLeFix project in WSL. This multidisciplinary project combines sub-seasonal drought forecasting with different impact models like forest fire, glacier alterations, bark beetle developments and biodiversity, aims to predict various drought-related extreme events with the help of machine learning methods. Her work mainly focuses on the biodiversity aspect of this project. With the approach of physiological modelling, she will investigate the impact of extreme temperatures and water availabilities on species fitness of the Swiss fauna and crops under climate change scenarios.
Master students
Mudit Joshi
In his Master's thesis, Mudit delves into the deep-time dynamics of plant macroevolution in response to climate shifts and bio-geodynamic processes. Employing the R-based mechanistic model Gen3sis, he simulates and assesses biodiversity changes across diverse climate trajectories over the past 400 million years. This research provides critical insights into the impact of historical landscape transformations, driven by climate and plate tectonics, on current biodiversity, with potential implications for future predictions.
Janic Cathomen
Assessing interspecific animal interactions is crucial to understanding species diversity. These interactions are often shaped and defined by movement and, thus, when and where animals are present. Based on camera trap inputs and a Poisson regression, Janic aims to use machine learning to predict red deer's spatial and temporal distribution in the Swiss national park. This approach should be reproducible after predators (mainly wolves) emerge to assess predation's role in the ungulates' behaviour.
Gengchen Yang
In his master thesis, Gengchen focuses on developing an algorithm that efficiently quantifies landscape connectivity on large spatial scales. The algorithm will be applied to Hengduan Mountains, a global biodiversity hotspot, to test whether landscape connectivity is correlated with endemic species richness. His research aims to better understand how landscape characteristics drove allopatric speciation and shaped the current diversity pattern of endemic species.
Nadine Graf
Nadine is interested in eDNA as a non-invasive monitoring tool for rare species. Her Master's Thesis project focuses on using environmental DNA (eDNA) and CRISPR-Cas assay technology to detect rare mammal species. She is specifically interested in the detection of terrestrial and semi-aquatic mammal species in the Swiss alpine region.
Raphaël Greilsamer
Raphaël is interested in the assessment of marine mammals’ populations in the West of France and North of Europe. Marine mammals are key organisms of the marine ecosystem currently experiencing diverse types of pressures. He will use a new monitoring tool, combining both CRISPR-Cas assay technology and eDNA to detect marine mammals DNA in samples collected in areas of interest. The long-term goal of this project is to provide a real-time monitoring of marine mammals via a fast and precise knowledge about their presence in different zones worldwide.
Georg Flückiger
Georg’s thesis is part of the Reef Futures project, and the main aim is to quantify productivity of reef fishes on a global scale. To project this crucial ecosystem service, which is fundamental for maintenance of biodiversity and food security of coastal communities, he will use projections of biomass and ranges of reef fishes and combine them with different frameworks to estimate productivity. In addition, he will analyze how productivity is projected to change with different scenarios of future climate change.
Mélissa Jaquier
Mélissa investigates the detection variation of environmental DNA (eDNA) diversity along an environmental gradient (from coast to pelagic). To understand the diffusion of eDNA, Mélissa is modelling the molecule’s movement around four islands in the Indian Ocean. Her research aims at tweaking and improving the eDNA method to allow future biodiversity monitoring in a wide range of marine shallow habitats, enhancing conservation and management of marine ecosystems and biodiversity.
Rémy Le Goff
Rémy's research internship is part of a project to develop a pipeline that allows a better and faster analysis of global marine environmental DNA (eDNA). The first step is to develop an assignation algorithm based on machine learning that directly assigns a taxa (species, genus, family) to an eDNA sequence without any pre-processing to reduce the time of analysis molecular data. The goal is to calculate, based on this assignation, biodiversity indices (taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional) that will allow the monitoring of marine habitat in a more efficient way than before.
Dominic Stemmler
Dominic is working on a coupling of a 3D geodynamical marker-in-cell multigrid solver (I3ELVIS) with a biological spatial diversification model of lineages through time (SPLIT). He will create a toolbox for such couplings and investigate the impact of atmospherical changes by LIP events and their degassing for mass extinction events. The results will be compared to historical extinction events and the phylogenetic trees analyzed.
Camille Senn
Camille investigates the relationship between dispersal traits and phenotypic variability between reef fishes among a gradient of exposure, within and between coral reef systems in the Indian Ocean. She uses geometric morphometric measurements and models to identify potential shape variations as a signal of local adaptation to specific habitats.
Haozhi Ma
Haozhi focusses on forest tree cover patterns around big cities globally. The basic ideas are to untangle what causes the tree cover pattern variation across the globe and what could be done do to maintain reasonably high tree cover forests around big cities. He uses spatial statistical models to do some straightforward studies under the context of macroecology.
Madleina Gerecke
Madleina investigates and projects landscape transitions in Switzerland using models. Additionally, she links the different landscape types and
features with landscape services for humans. The information will be combined to assess the future state of landscape services in Switzerland.
Hanneke van 't Veen
Hanneke investigates whether variations in trait distribution within plant species pools across Switzerland could explain the response of grassland communities to drought events. She uses statistical distribution metrics to quantify differences in grassland trait distribution and compares this to shifts in grassland productivity during past drought events.
Sebastian Schneider
Sebastian investigates the use of remote sensing to quantify biodiversity in Switzerland toward an automated sensing approach of change applied over the landscape. He uses different machine learning algorithms provided by the open source machine learning platform H2O.
Michael Hochstrasser
Michael is building an application for automated species identification from sound using machine learning. The goal of this project is to relate the sound properties recorded in grassland to its biodiversity, with a special focus on the diversity of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are excellent bioindicators with more than 100 species in Switzerland. Michael is studying Computational Science, the project is together with the Institute for Machine Learning at the Computer Science Department.
Kaibin Tang
Kaibin investigates how marine fish assemblages will respond to climate change. He uses species distribution models to project future fish assemblages under different climate change and dispersal scenarios and quantifies the changes on the fish food webs.
Anne Haeberle
Anne investigates the response of grasslands biodiversity to fertilization using remote sensing indicators.
Bachelor students
Michelle Eichenberger
In her Bachelor’s thesis Michelle investigates the changes of community composition in the Swiss alps during the Holocene and how different forms of land use have shaped them. Using sedimentary eDNA from several alpine lakes, she tries to analyze changes in local species composition and looks for correlations with indicators of land use.
Robin Bauknecht
In his Bachelor's thesis, Robin integrates environmental DNA and remote sensing variables to model biodiversity within and across tropical river ecosystems. Through this interdisciplinary approach, he seeks to develop insights into the complex factors shaping biodiversity patterns and processes in those vital ecosystems.
Guests
external pageMarcel Ricklicall_made
Marcel is a student of the Master Transdisciplinary Studies at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (external pageZHdKcall_made) and joined the group for a 3-months residency. This residency is part of a collaboration between the external pageartists-in-labs programcall_made and the Master Transdisciplinary Studies.
Marcel interest lies in scientific research about the effects of climate change on biodiversity and how technology shapes the respective discourse. Since 2011, Marcel has been exploring the ways in which we are fundamentally changing our planet through an ongoing series of photographic field studies. The energy and resource demands of humanity, along with their resulting environmental impacts, often severe and irreversible, serve as the leitmotif of his work. In previous projects, Marcel focused his lens on ore mining in Sweden, which results in massive land subsidence and has even caused the resettlement of an entire city ("Kiruna/2015"). He also turned his attention to brown coal mining in Germany, where entire landscapes are sacrificed ("Lausitzer Braunkohlerevier/2015"). New hopes in the fight against climate collapse have also caught his attention: pictures of the world’s largest wind farm in the Gobi Desert and a Chinese solar power plant that couldn’t be more futuristic illustrate what the energy revolution could look like (“Ambivalent/2017-18”). In his most recent work ("AEON/2018–ongoing“) Marcel delves into pressing concerns surrounding nuclear waste disposal and the complex challenge of communicating this problem over millennia.
Marcel's work impressively addresses an epoch in which humankind has become the most important influencing factor on our planet’s biological, geological and atmospheric processes: the Anthropocene.