The Institute
The sustainable use of land and natural resources relies on an informed understanding of the dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems and how they respond to external forcings and management interventions. The Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems addresses this dynamics and its bearings on land use, ecosystem functions, environmental services and natural resource availability at global, regional and local scales, developing and disseminating new knowledge, methods, and tools to foster the sustainable use and adaptive management of terrestrial ecosystems with a particular focus on forests and forested landscapes.
Areas of interest include:
- ecosystem services and conservation in temperate and tropical regions
- land use at the agriculture-forest nexus
- the effects of climate and land-use changes on soil and water resources
- natural hazards in mountain regions
In cross-disciplinary collaboration with colleagues in D-USYS and external page WSL, notably in the areas of climate change, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles, ITES offers an innovative educational programme for students at the BSc and MSc level. ITES students and researchers also benefit from interactions with Swiss federal and cantonal agencies, and to international research, policy and development agencies, and from an extensive network of international collaborations in Asia, Africa, and North and South America.
ITES comprises the following professorships:
Groups
- chevron_right Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution
- chevron_right Ecosystem Management
- chevron_right Forest Ecology
- chevron_right Forest Resources Management
- chevron_right Physics of Environmental Systems
- chevron_right Physics of Soils Terrestrial Ecosystems
- chevron_right Soil Resources
- chevron_right Prof. Loïc Pellissier
- chevron_right Prof. Jaboury Ghazoul
- chevron_right Prof. Harald Bugmann
- chevron_right Prof. Verena Griess
- chevron_right Prof. James Kirchner
- chevron_right Prof. Andrea Carminati
- chevron_right Prof. Sebastian Dötterl