IAS News

Organisms exposed to consistent interactions across generations often coevolve to optimize their coexistence. This occurs between plants and pollinators or hosts and parasites. However, it is not known if plants coexisting over multiple generations in a community evolve to avoid competition and boost individual fitness. A study conducted by Anja Schmutz and Christian Schöb at the Agricultural Ecology group at ETH Zurich tackles this question.  

Michaela Jung, a postdoc in a joint project of the Fruit Breeding Group at Agroscope and the Molecular Plant Breeding Group at ETH Zurich, has been awarded the Professor Albert Soenen Prize for her doctoral thesis. She developed genomic approaches that make apple breeding more efficient. The award ceremony will take place on 12 June 2024 in Belgium.

It's been a few years. But when her father started keeping bees in the family garden in the Poschiavo Valley, she realised that insects were her passion. Francesca Ferrari, Master's student of Agricultural Sciences at ETH Zurich, therefore moved to Grossdietwil in the Canton of Lucerne for her professional internship. There, Andermatt Biocontrol Suisse sells, develops and researches products for sustainable plant protection.  

It abseils from a height and swings around obstacles: robot Avocado will one day manoeuvre through the canopy of the rainforest and collect data for researchers about this hard-to-reach habitat.  

Six years ago, Fridolin Stocker, Luca Costa and Yanik Costa bought an abandoned farm in the north of Zambia. Fridolin Stocker and Luca Costa had met while studying Agricultural Sciences at ETH Zurich. It took them three years to transform the land from a wasteland into a sustainable coffee farm. Today, the team is waiting for their first coffee harvest.

The research teams of Johanna Jacobi and Emmanuel Frossard, both from the Institute of Agricultural Sciences at the Department of Environmental Science (D-USYS) at ETH Zurich, played a key role in the production of the documentary film "The Green Vein". After participation in more than 20 festivals around the world, winning four and receiving two honourable mentions, the film is now released to the general public.  

As the RUNRES project enters its second phase of developing and now upscaling innovations for circular economies in the rural-urban nexus, private-public-partnerships will continue to play an important role.

New ways to measure nitrous oxide emissions from soils as well as detect invasive pests in vineyards are the foci of two new interdisciplinary projects starting in 2024. Both projects are funded by the Center’s Smart Sustainable Farming Research Program.

The Center announces two new projects starting in 2024 focused on understanding how different crop rotation practices affect water and nitrogen balances as well as production. Both projects are funded by the Improving Sustainability of Agricultural and Food Systems across Key Environmental Metrics Research Program.