Blog

As a researcher, group leader, teacher, reviewer, and editor, I work a lot with text. AI is changing the way I read, revise, and evaluate text. In some ways it’s becoming easier as texts by my students often come in a polished form that makes it easier to parse its information than when being distracted by language imperfections.

Patricia Helpap recently published her Master thesis work in AGU Advances (Helpap et al., 2026). She contrasted the droughts of the recent past (2000-2024) versus an extended context, covering the past 600 years and the unforced atmospheric variability, represented by an ensemble of twenty 600-year simulations that together span the range of possible “realisations” of the inherently chaotic climate.

Ich bin besorgt über die aktuelle Trockenheit, und vor allem wie in der Schweiz oft mit dem Problem zunehmender Trockenheit als Folge des Klimawandels umgegangen wird. Den Optimismus, der von einem Experten diesem News-Beitrag von SRF (link) versprüht wurde, kann ich nicht teilen.

Here are some highlights of our research and collaborations in 2024. Research How does nitrogen influence the global carbon cycle? Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plants and is used both in photosynthesis enzymes and for building cell structures.

The problem Geospatial data often has a time dimension. Such temporal geospatial data often comes in the form of multiple files that contain the data of a single time step - in the form of a geospatial map - or in the form of files that each contain the data of a subset of the time steps.

Having good estimates for the global total annual nitrogen (N) uptake by plants is important because it tells us how much N is cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. We want to know this for example for putting the human perturbation of the global N cycle into context or as a target for models of the global carbon and nitrogen cycles.

Forest demographic processes are being altered by global change. Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide has been reported to enhance photosynthesis and tree growth rates. Different studies have reported increased tree growth globally over the last decades (Brienen et al.

An attempt to connect eco-evolutionary theory to a leaf’s energy balance to unravel the footprint of leaf temperature on ecosystem dynamics.

With large collections of Earth Observation (EO) data becoming increasingly available, new possibilities to better understand and quantify environmental changes also arise. The acquisition, management, distribution, and analysis of such data is not trivial and can take up the majority of the time in modelling projects.

Our group is contributing to this year’s EGU General Assembly with various sessions, talks, and posters! See below for when and where you can find us. Sessions Thursday (27 April)