Publications related to Food security

Geospatial Tools and Remote Sensing Strategies for Timely Humanitarian Response: A Case Study on Drought Monitoring in Eswatini

This article explores the escalating impact of natural disasters, particularly droughts, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), with a specific focus on Eswatini. Over the last century, approximately 63 million people in SADC countries have ...

MDPI2024

Soft Robotics: A Route to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in Robotics

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes

Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Civil war hinders crop production and threatens food security in Syria

Li Mi, Xi Li

Assessing the impact of violent conflict on Syrian agriculture is challenging given data limitations and attributability issues. Using satellite data at 30 m spatial resolution, we found that the extent of productive cropland showed greater interannual var ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Population-scale dietary interests during the COVID-19 pandemic

Robert West, Kristina Gligoric

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has altered people's lives around the world. Here we document population-wide shifts in dietary interests in 18 countries in 2020, as revealed through time series of Google search volumes. We find that during the first wave of the COVI ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Computational Approaches for Studying Dietary Behaviors with Digital Traces

Kristina Gligoric

Human nutrition and dietary habits shape our health, daily life, societies, the environment, and life on earth in general. However, it remains challenging to understand and attempt to change dietary behaviors using traditional methods due to measurement an ...

EPFL2022

New and improved methods for integrated models of metabolism and gene expression

Pierre Guy Rémy Salvy

The beginning of the 21st century was marked by the advent of disruptive technologies, which ushered an era of groundbreaking advances in fundamental sciences, carried by the great pace at which computational capabilities spread and evolved. But the new ce ...

EPFL2021

The Effects of Time-Restricted Eating versus Standard Dietary Advice on Weight, Metabolic Health and the Consumption of Processed Food: A Pragmatic Randomised Controlled Trial in Community-Based Adults

Felix Naef, Nicholas Edward Phillips

Weight loss is key to controlling the increasing prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MS) and its components, i.e., central obesity, hypertension, prediabetes and dyslipidaemia. The goals of our study were two-fold. First, we characterised the relationships b ...

2021

Techno-economic assessment of bioethanol production from lignocellulose by consortium-based consolidated bioprocessing at industrial scale

Oliver Kröcher

Lignocellulose-based biofuels are of major importance to mitigate the impact of international traffic and transport on climate change while sustaining agricultural land for food supply. Highly integrated systems like consolidated bioprocessing (CBP), where ...

ELSEVIER2021

Alone or With Others? Understanding Eating Episodes of College Students with Mobile Sensing

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

Understanding food consumption patterns and contexts using mobile sensing is fundamental to build mobile health applications that require minimal user interaction to generate mobile food diaries. Many available mobile food diaries, both commercial and in r ...

Association for Computing Machinery2020

Optimizing the trade-off between performance measures and operational risk in a food supply chain environment

Philippe Wieser, Nicolas Zufferey, Simone Lydia Voldrich

In the context of a growing world population and the need to use limited resources responsibly, this study is motivated by the increasing pressures on the food industry, which include issues of food security, safety, and waste. In the context of a global f ...

SPRINGER2020

Biogeoinformatics for the management of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR)

Solange Catherine Gaillard

In the context of both severe selection in farm animals and potential effects of climate change, it is crucial to implement a sustainable management of the breeding practice, supported by a judicious use of geographic information technologies. Based on thi ...

EPFL2020

Stakeholders’ Perspectives to Support the Integration of Ecosystem Services in Spatial Planning in Switzerland

Jérôme Chenal, Rémi Jaligot

Integrating the concept of ecosystem services (ES) into spatial planning is an opportunity to make land use and management choices that maximize the delivery of multiple ES. The assessment of social demand can be useful for the identification of priority a ...

2019

Assessing spatial temporal patterns of ecosystem services in Switzerland

Jérôme Chenal, Martí Bosch Padrós, Rémi Jaligot

Despite the importance of understanding the historical dynamics of ecosystem services (ES), littleresearch has focused on a historical, spatially explicit, assessment of ES supply. This research is aimed at understanding the spatial patterns and potential ...

2019

Community-based landslide risk reduction: a review of a Red Cross soil bioengineering for resilience program in Honduras

Silvia Hostettler, Antonio D'Acunzi

Effective long-term participation of communities in disaster risk reduction measures in landslide-prone areas continues to be a challenge. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which community-based soil-bioengineering techniques allow for effective mi ...

2019

Effectiveness of a strategic energy reserve during the energy transition: The case of Switzerland

Paul Adrianus Van Baal

Switzerland is considering implementing a strategic energy reserve, a novel policy instrument that remunerates power plant operators for storing a minimum amount of energy in reservoirs to convert into electricity when called upon. The policy is envisioned ...

2019

Microstructured Fibers for the Production of Food

Véronique Michaud, Francesco Stellacci, Fabien Sorin, Yunpeng Qu, Federica Sordo, Emma-Rose Janecek

Food engineering faces the difficult challenge of combining taste, i.e., tailoring texture and rheology of food matrices with the balanced intake of healthy nutrients. In materials science, fiber suspensions and composites have been developed as a versatil ...

Wiley2019

Long-term effects of crop succession, soil tillage and climate on wheat yield and soil properties

Mathieu Raymond Santonja, María Paula Sanginés De Cárcer

Climate change is increasing crop losses and yield variability with impacts for global food security. In this context, conservation agriculture appears as a potential solution to maintain crop productivity, soil fertility and environmental sustainability. ...

2019

Conversion of food and kitchen waste to value-added products

Edgard Gnansounou

Food and kitchen waste - omnipresent in every corner of the world serve as an excellent source of value added products owing to high organic content. Regardless of existence of various traditional methods of land filling or biogas production used to harnes ...

ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2019

Translating Science Into Business Innovation: The Case of Open Food and Nutrition Data Hackathons

Christopher Tucci, Heidi Christina Gautschi, Gianluigi Viscusi

In this article, we explore the use of hackathons and open data in corporations’ open innovation portfolios, addressing a new way for companies to tap into the creativity and innovation of early-stage startup culture, in this case applied to the food and n ...

2018