Publications related to Environmental degradation

Stability and degradation of (oxy)nitride photocatalysts for solar water splitting

Sophia Haussener, Franky Esteban Bedoya Lora

Advancing towards alternative technologies for the sustainable production of hydrogen is a necessity for the successful integration of this potentially green fuel in the future. Photocatalytic and photoelectrochemical water splitting are promising concepts ...

2024

Learning Linearized Degradation of Health Indicators using Deep Koopman Operator Approach

Olga Fink, Sergei Garmaev

With the current trend of increasing complexity of industrial systems, the construction and monitoring of health indicators becomes even more challenging. Given that health indicators are commonly employed to predict the end of life, a crucial criterion fo ...

Research Publishing2023

Atlas Narratives of Anthropogenic Transformations across the Vietnamese Mekong Delta's Urban-Rural Territories: Water Ecosystems as Subject for the Social Ecological Transition

Sylvie Tram Nguyen

Well beyond the impact of climate change, anthropogenic modifications of the Vietnam Mekong Delta's ecosystems have resulted in environmental degradation and subsequent loss in ecosystems. The environmental impacts include but are not limited to accelerate ...

EPFL2023

Genomics and conservation: Guidance from training to analyses and applications

Annie Sandrine Guillaume

Environmental change is intensifying the biodiversity crisis and threatening species across the tree of life. Conservation genomics can help inform conservation actions and slow biodiversity loss. However, more training, appropriate use of novel genomic me ...

Wiley2023

The Reef Environment Centralized InFormation System (RECIFS) : An integrated geo‐environmental database for coral reef research and conservation

Stéphane Joost, Oliver Michele Selmoni

Motivation: Host to intricate networks of marine species, coral reefs are among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth. Over the past few decades, major degradations of coral reefs have been observed worldwide, which is largely attributed to the ...

2023

Perfect adaptation achieved by transport limitations governs the inorganic phosphate response in S. cerevisiae

Sebastian Maerkl, Shiyu Cheng, Hon Ming Andrew Yip, Evan James Olson, Michael Andrew Crone

Cells cope with and adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions. Sophisticated regulatory networks allow cells to adjust to these fluctuating environments. One such archetypal system is the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Pho regulon. When external inorganic ...

National Academy of Sciences2023

Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Threats in the Era of Grand Societal Challenges

Enrico Bergamini

We live in an era defined by attempts to grapple with an ever-expanding array of grand societal challenges (GCs). These challenges comprise transformational social and environmental issues, such as environmental degradation and global pandemics, and the cr ...

EPFL2023

Linking Soil Structure, Hydraulic Properties, and Organic Carbon Dynamics: A Holistic Framework to Study the Impact of Climate Change and Land Management

Sara Bonetti

Climate change and unsustainable land management practices have resulted in extensive soil degradation, including alteration of soil structure (i.e., aggregate and pore size distributions), loss of soil organic carbon, and reduction of water and nutrient h ...

2023

Understanding the mechanisms of non-thermal plasma treatments on seeds

Alexandra Waskow

The motivation driving plasma-seed treatment research is the renewed importance of sustainable, eco-friendly agriculture. There is a constant interest in finding alternatives to minimize resource use and environmental degradation, while ensuring healthy se ...

EPFL2022

Environmental preferences of occupants: A multi-domain approach in the Swiss open office case study

Marilyne Andersen, Jan Wienold, Dusan Licina, Dolaana Khovalyg, Caroline Karmann, Verena Marie Barthelmes, Arnab Chatterjee

Defining indoor environmental conditions that meet the needs and preferences of occupants in open space offices can be challenging since the same space might be occupied by people with different individual needs and preferences regarding what constitutes a ...

IOP Science2021

OUR COMMON SOILS: West Lausanne Urbanization as Anthropedogenesis, A Section through the Spaces and Times of Urban Soils

Antoine Vialle

Motivated by ever-increasing soil degradation and artificialization due to past and present urban growth dynamics, the current trend of spatial planning policies at the European and Swiss levels is promoting increased soil protection, by avoiding new devel ...

EPFL2021

Untersuchung der ökomorphologischen Wirksamkeit von Sedimentzugaben unterhalb von Talsperren [Assessment of the eco-morphological effectiveness of sediment augmentation downstream of dams]

Giovanni De Cesare, Christian Mörtl

The regulation of discharge and the retention of sediments in reservoirs disturb the natural water dynamics in residual flow stretches below reservoirs. However, a dynamic river morphology as well as near-natural hydrological hydrographs are fundamental ...

ETH2021

Conditions for the emergence of circumnutations in plant roots

Dario Floreano, Ilya Loshchilov

The plant root system shows remarkably complex behaviors driven by environmental cues and internal dynamics, whose interplay remains largely unknown. A notable example is circumnutation growth movements, which are growth oscillations from side to side of t ...

2021

Liveability from Above: Understanding Quality of Life with Overhead Imagery and Deep Neural Networks

Devis Tuia, Alex Hubertus Levering

Urban planners are increasingly interested in understanding what makes a neighbourhood pleasant and liveable. In this paper, we use the overhead perspective as a new way to describe and understand liveability of city neighborhoods. We predict building qual ...

IEEE2021

Climate change effects on groundwater recharge and temperatures in Swiss alluvial aquifers

Adrien Michel

Climate change will have both quantitative and qualitative effects on groundwater resources. These impacts differ for aquifers in solid and unconsolidated rock, in urban or rural locations, and in the principal processes of groundwater recharge. Having kno ...

2021

The embodied flow of built-up land in China?s interregional trade and its implications for regional carbon balance

Qinli Lu

Built-up land intensively concentrates human activities, and its area or the changes in its intensity dramatically affect the regional carbon balance. This study proposed a new framework to assess how in China, the interregional trade?s use of built-up lan ...

ELSEVIER2021

Species conservation in the face of global environmental changes: surface-based modelling of geo-environmental data to identify vulnerable populations

Estelle Rochat

Human activities are resulting in many land-use changes, particularly due to urbanisation and intensification of agricultural practices. Because of these changes, in addition to climate change, many species are facing habitat degradation. In order to avoid ...

EPFL2020

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

Adapt or Perish: Evolutionary Rescue in a Gradually Deteriorating Environment

Anne-Florence Raphaëlle Bitbol, Loïc Marrec

We investigate the evolutionary rescue of a microbial population in a gradually deteriorating environment, through a combination of analytical calculations and stochastic simulations. We consider a population destined for extinction in the absence of mutan ...

2020

Contrasting Leaf Trait Responses of Conifer and Broadleaved Seedlings to Altered Resource Availability Are Linked to Resource Strategies

Christoph Bachofen, Yan Li Zhang

(1) Understanding tree seedling responses to water, nutrient, and light availability is crucial to precisely predict potential shifts in composition and structure of forest communities under future climatic conditions. (2) We exposed seedlings of widesprea ...

2020