News 2014

Betsy, Danielle, and Johan presented at the Engelberg Academia conference on Food Security.

external pageHere, you can see their presentations

WFSC Presentations at Academia Engelberg

Roman Hüppi was awarded...

...the Outstanding Poster Award at the EGU meeting in Vienna for his contribution “Effects of biochar addition to soil on nitrogen fluxes in winter wheat lysimeter experiment”. external pagehttp://www.egu2014.eu/

Successful PhD completion by Engil Pereira

We are happy and proud to announce that Engil Pereira finsihed her PhD degree based on her dissertation titled: "CAN BIOCHAR MITIGATE NITROGEN LOSSES IN ORGANIC FARMING SYSTEMS?"

Philippe Duchaufour Medal for Johan Six

external pageThe 2014 Philippe Duchaufour Medal is awarded to Johan Six for his fundamental contributions to soil science through studies of biogeochemical cycling, aggregate and soil organic matter dynamics.

Inaugural Talk Johan Six

Johan presented on the 24th of February his well-attended inaugural talk at ETH

Highlights 2014

Research

In the past 18 months the SAE group has grown from 1 to 22 people (including 6 PostDocs, 5 PhD students, 4 technicians, 3 associated/visiting PhD students, 1 MSc student).
Three proposals were funded through the FACCE-JPI program to work in collaboration with lots of international groups on agriculture and climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Two proposals were funded through Mercator and SNF to assess the potential of improved organic farming systems within the Swiss agricultural landscape.
Postdocs Wilma Blaser, Charlotte Decock and Engil Pereira secured seed funding for their projects on cocoa in Ghana, Basmati rice in India, and sweet potato in Mozambique, respectively.
The Zürich-Basel Plant Science Center awarded Engil Pereira a post-doctoral fellowship to study the dynamics of functional microorganisms in cropping systems.
PhD student, Gina Garland received 1500 CHF to go to Montpellier, France for the Phosphorus in Soils and Plants conference.
Johan is Executive Editor for the Journal "external pageSoil".

Teaching

Members of the SAE group have started to contribute to undergraduate and graduate teaching by being involved in several lecture classes, excursion and summer schools.
In the fall term 2014 the group will launch its first own course offer, the seminar "Agroecologists without borders" for Master students (17 students signed up so far). In spring term the next two own course offers are launched: an introductory lecture "Agroecosystems I" for Bachelor students and a seminar on "Biogeochemical Modeling" for Master students.
The reconstructions and tranformations of the Haldliweg greenhouse for hands-on teaching activities has started.

Outreach

Johan, Betsy, and Engil have contributed several blogs to the Zukunftsblog of ETH with some of those blogs attracting a lot of public interest.