Climate change already affects snowfall and snow depth patterns in the Alps, and these changes will likely become more pronounced in the future.
change on avalanche release is still largely unknown, as only very few studies have
Climate change exacerbates drought-related extremes, with significant ecological, economic, and human health impacts. MaLeFiX project is developing an interdisciplinary platform that will provide comprehensive four-week forecasts of drought-related extremes – buying stakeholders valuable time to act.
Droughts are complex phenomena that have significant implications for many aspects
The ExtremeThaw project is working to enhance our understanding of rapid permafrost thaw in Switzerland’s alpine regions, helping to shape effective response strategies.
how thawing permafrost may impact alpine ecosystems and the services they provide have
This project aims to further develop the Swiss plate geophone system, a passive seismic method to measure bedload transport in water courses, with a new set of controlled experiments and field calibration measurements.
; it has been installed at more than 20 field sites, and direct bedload samples have
Ecological and economic systems are complex adaptive systems (CAS): they are systems that are composed of many entities with heterogeneous characteristics, which interact and experience selection processes. Those processes act at the entity level, but are key in determining the macroscopic behaviour at the system level, a feature that make those systems unique.
Analogous economic processes have been proposed to explain differences in economic
Long-term research on the interactions between changes in land use and climate and their consequences regarding forest health and dynamic in the pine forests at low elevation of Central Alps
low elevation forests within alpine central valleys, such as the Valais, pines have
Detect a „defoliation fingerprint“ in stable isotopes in tree rings.
However, until recently only a few studies have studied hydrogen in tree rings.
The destructive capacity of powder snow avalanche is caused by high-energy pulses within his complex layering. The goal of this project is to understand the origin and nature of the these pulses and quantify the danger they pose to infrastructure.
Field observations at the VdlS have shown two processes closely related to pulse
We use a long-term precipitation manipulation experiment in mature Pinus sylvestris forests and a natural precipitation gradient from 840 mm to 290 mm/year with Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica, to study the „Drought effects on reproductive phenology and the physiological mechanisms of pine trees“.
al. 2013), or on shifts of reproductive phenology (Mazer et al. 2015) of plants have
This is a working group with members from all over Europe carrying out research in primeval forest and forest reserves. The main goal of the group is to explore possibilities to join forces, enhance the visibility and exploit the potential of the existing long-term monitoring plots in primeval forests and forest reserves of Europe.
These plots and the data collected on them for multiple decades and often >50 years have
