Publications related to Planetary boundaries

Urban sustainability assessment through spatial lenses: turning the spotlight on the local neighbourhood unit

With global environmental change and quality of life issues at the forefront of international discussions today, urban development strategies and policies are often framed around various sustainability or liveability goals. Regardless of the sustainability ...

EPFL2023

Meteolakes: An operational online three-dimensional forecasting platform for lake hydrodynamics

Alfred Johny Wüest, Damien Bouffard, Theo Baracchini

Environmental management depends on high-quality monitoring and its meaningful interpretation. The combination of local weather dynamics, regional anthropogenic stresses and global environmental changes make the evaluation of monitoring information in dyna ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2020

A New Look at Civic Design: Park Systems in America

Matthew Skjonsberg

A New Look at Civic Design reflects on the nature of the various crises facing the very idea of democracy today, explicitly in relation to climate change - namely mass extinctions, water scarcity and overabundance, and in general widespread and increasing ...

EPFL2018

Common reef-building coral in the Northern Red Sea resistant to elevated temperature and acidification

Anders Meibom, Stéphane Laurent Escrig, Thomas Krüger, Maoz Fine, Julia Marie Jeanne Yvonne Bodin, Maria-Evangelia Giovani

Coral reefs are currently experiencing substantial ecological impoverishment as a result of anthropogenic stressors, and the majority of reefs are facing immediate risk. Increasing ocean surface temperatures induce frequent coral mass bleaching events—the ...

Royal Soc2017

Late Holocene climate: Natural or anthropogenic?

Jed Oliver Kaplan

For more than a decade, scientists have argued about the warmth of the current interglaciation. Was the warmth of the preindustrial late Holocene natural in origin, the result of orbital changes that had not yet driven the system into a new glacial state? ...

Amer Geophysical Union2016

A diagnostic procedure for applying the social-ecological systems framework in diverse cases

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer

The framework for analyzing sustainability of social-ecological systems (SES) framework of Elinor Ostrom is a multitier collection of concepts and variables that have proven to be relevant for understanding outcomes in diverse SES. The first tier of this f ...

Resilience Alliance2015

Modeling Social-Ecological Feedback Effects in the Implementation of Payments for Environmental Services in Pasture-Woodlands

Alexandre Buttler, François Gillet, Alexander Ludwig Johannes Peringer

An effective implementation of payment for environmental services (PES) must allow for complex interactions of coupled social-ecological systems. We present an integrative study of the pasture-woodland landscape of the Swiss Jura Mountains combining method ...

Resilience Alliance2013

Assessing the Comprehensiveness of Supply Chain Environmental Strategies

Ralf Seifert, Joana Maria Comas Marti

As environmental awareness grows, firms are expected to expand the scope of their environmental strategies beyond organisational boundaries and to address more comprehensively environmental issues in their supply chains and product life cycles. Drawing on ...

Wiley-Blackwell2013

On quantifying ecologically sustainable flow releases in a diverted river reach

Paolo Perona, Lorenzo Gorla

Water demand for hydropower production has been increasing along with a growing awareness of the importance of preserving riparian ecosystems and their biodiversity. Some Cantons in Switzerland have begun replacing the inadequate concept of Minimum Flow Re ...

Elsevier Science Bv2013

The ESPRI project: astrometric exoplanet search with PRIMA I. Instrument description and performance of first light observations

Ludger Weber, Yvan Michellod

Context. The ESPRI project relies on the astrometric capabilities offered by the PRIMA facility of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer for discovering and studying planetary systems. Our survey consists of obtaining high-precision astrometry for a larg ...

Edp Sciences S A2013

Modelling prehistoric land use and carbon budgets: A critical review

Jed Oliver Kaplan

An evaluation of modelled estimates for C release following early land clearance at the global level based on new model assumptions suggests that earlier studies may have underestimated its magnitude, chiefly because of underestimation of the mid-Holocene ...

2011

Holocene carbon emissions as a result of anthropogenic land cover change

Jed Oliver Kaplan, Kristen Marie Krumhardt

Humans have altered the Earth’s land surface since the Paleolithic mainly by clearing woody vegetation first to improve hunting and gathering opportunities, and later to provide agricultural cropland. In the Holocene, agriculture was established on nearly ...

2011

Stochastic modeling of nutrient losses in streams: Interactions of climatic, hydrologic, and biogeochemical controls

Andrea Rinaldo, Gianluca Botter

We present an analytical, stochastic approach for quantifying intra-annual fluctuations of in-stream nutrient losses induced by naturally variable hydrologic conditions. The relevance of the problem we address lies in the growing concern for the major envi ...

American Geophysical Union2010

The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe

Jed Oliver Kaplan, Kristen Marie Krumhardt

Humans have transformed Europe’s landscapes since the establishment of the first agricultural societies in the mid-Holocene. The most important anthropogenic alteration of the natural environment was the clearing of forests to establish cropland and pastur ...

2009

Ecological response of a multi-purpose river development project using macro-invertebrates richness and fish habitat value

Marc Pellaud

It has been acknowledged that river morphology and hydrology have been intensively altered due to the anthropic demands in floodplain land use and management, flood protection, promotion of navigability or energy production. Rivers were transformed in wate ...

EPFL2007