Author: Stuart Lane

Stuart Lane will serve on the Swiss National Science Foundation Research Council from the 1st January 2019, representing environmental science in the Division 4 (programmes)

Congratulations to Annegret Larsen who has been appointed to a Lectureship in Catchment Science at the University of Manchester, UK, from the 1st September 2018.

Congratulations to Chrystelle Gabbud who has been appointed environmental manager with Alpiq SA from 1 August 2018.

The group is part of a consortium led by Tom Battin at EPFL who has received four years of funding to study microbial biofilms and their implications for habitability and ecosystem evolution in glacial floodplain streams. Abbreviated to “ENSEMBLE” the focus of the project is how, in the presence of rapidly retreating glaciers, microbial biofilms respond and in turn impact the ecosystem evolution of glacial-floodplain systems. We will work at the interface of microbial ecology, vegetation ecology, hydrology and geomorphology to address the following questions:

(i) What are the ecological strategies and genomic underpinnings of biofilms that make them successful in colonizers in GFSs that emanate from glacier shrinkage?

(ii) Do microbial biofilms change, through ecosystem engineering, the geomorphodynamics of GFSs thereby increasing their habitability?

(iii) Does the interaction between microbial and geomorphic processes affect ecosystem heterogeneity in glacier floodplains?

We will be working primarily at the Otemma glacier in the Val de Bagnes (VS), but also the Rosengletscher (GR) and Zinal glacier, Val d’Anniviers (VS).

A new book, the Handbook of Critical Physical Geography, has been published by Stuart Lane, with colleagues Rebecca Lave and Christine Bierman.

Congratulations to Maarten Bakker who has been awarded an SNSF Early Post Doc Mobility grant to work at Grenoble Alpes University, France.