MSc

Main supervision: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Stocker Co-supervision: Dr. Antoine Cabon, WSL Birmensdorf Forests currently represent a large carbon sink, offsetting a quarter of human CO2 emissions each year, bur large uncertainty remains on the future strength of this sink.

Background Seasonal water deficits, caused by the imbalance of water from the land surface through evapotranspiration and runoff and the gain through precipitation, are an important driver of agricultural productivity and forest growth.

Background Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) are key tools for understanding biosphere-climate feedbacks and transient vegetation dynamics in response to global change. A novel vegetation demography model, the BiomeE, is a mechanistic cohort-based model which simulates vegetation dynamics and biogeochemical processes.

Supervision: Prof. Benjamin Stocker Background Exchange fluxes of water vapour between ecosystems and the atmosphere are commonly measured using eddy-covariance technique. This gives information about how much water is transpired by plants and evaporated from soil and plant surfaces.

Supervision: Dr. Koen Hufkens and Prof. Benjamin Stocker We call on students to determine the importance of topographic and soil factors on natural vegetative landscape components (forest cover fraction, vegetation height, woody fraction).

Background The rate of CO2 uptake by photosynthesis is determined by the acclimation of leaves to the prevailing light environment. In dense forests, light intensity decreases exponentially as we go from the top of the canopy towards the ground, as light is absorbed and scattered by leaves.

Background There is a current scientific debate if the intensity of the recent 2003, 2015, and 2018 droughts is exceptional in the context of the last millennium. Based on tree-ring reconstructions, some authors find them to be within the range of natural variability (Ionita et al.