Publications related to Land use changes and transnational migration : the impact of remittances in Western Mexico

Soft robotics for farm to fork: applications in agriculture & farming

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

Agricultural tasks and environments range from harsh field conditions with semi-structured produce or animals, through to post-processing tasks in food-processing environments. From farm to fork, the development and application of soft robotics offers a pl ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Vers un projet territorial du vivant L'outil des réseaux écologiques comme projet urbanistique de revitalisation du paysage agricole

Marine Françoise Jeannine Villaret

The aim of my thesis is to provide urban architects and planners with working theoretical elements territorial project of the living. The living and the socio-ecological transition are key concepts in the nature and people paradigm, which asserts a human-n ...

EPFL2024

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

Jérôme Chenal

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

Quartiers rhodaniens en transition

Sara Sonia Formery Regazzoni

Over the course of history, the relationship between cities and their waters has shown different gradients of interweaving, marked by cycles of bonding and distancing. Following a period of complete neglect of urban watercourses, the versatile, multifacete ...

EPFL2024

Soil warming alters tree water use and canopy stomatal conductance in a mixed subtropical forest

Charlotte Grossiord, Christoph Bachofen

As air temperature and vapor pressure deficit (VPD) increase continuously, forests are losing more water through evapotranspiration, with large consequences for local and global hydrological cycles. In regions with high vegetation cover, soil warming can b ...

Elsevier2024

Urban boundary-layer flows in complex terrain: Dynamic interactions during a hot and dry summer season in Phoenix, Arizona

Aldo Brandi

Anthropogenic modification of natural landscapes to urban environments impacts land-atmosphere interactions in the boundary layer. Ample research has demonstrated the effect of such landscape transitions on development of the urban heat island (UHI), but c ...

Wiley2024

Migration distance from birthplace and its association with relative income and employment share among heterosexual couples in Switzerland

Vincent Kaufmann, Gil Viry, Alexis Gumy, Guillaume Simon Joseph Drevon, Florian Lucien Jacques Masse

Among heterosexual couples, employment of the female partner may suffer from household migration often driven by the job of the male partner. Most research has traditionally focused on the distance moved after couple formation and has neglected how far par ...

2024

Using automated design appraisal to model building-specific devaluation risk due to land-use change

Adam Robert Swietek

Uncertainty of spillover effects – including property devaluation - from proposed land-use change elicits opposition to local development. This hinders cities’ ability to implement land-use policy aimed at housing affordability and environmental sustainabi ...

2024

Investigation of microbial community dynamics in soil during variable hydrological forcing

Simiao Wang

Climate change is expected to alter the temporal distribution of precipitation events, leading to prolonged drought periods and an increased frequency of extreme precipitation events. Changes in precipitation pattern will directly affect soil moisture dyna ...

EPFL2024

Spatial Modeling for Building Design Evaluation: from Visual Landscape Quality Assessment to Devaluation Risk Estimation

Adam Robert Swietek

Zoning reform is a crucial tool for cities to adapt to contemporary challenges. However, its implementation remains challenging. Property owners, with a vested interest in the value of their neighborhoods, are sensitive to local developments and the potent ...

EPFL2024

Multiscale Spatiotemporal Characterization of Embodied Environmental Performance of Building Structures in Geneva from 1850 to 2018

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Catherine Elvire L. De Wolf, Serena Vanbutsele

Load-bearing systems in buildings, significant in material use and embodied greenhouse gas emissions (EGHGE), have lacked detailed analysis on their environmental and functional relationships over time and space. This study evaluates the environmental impa ...

2024

Fungal community composition predicts forest carbon storage at a continental scale

Nina Marion Aurélia Van Tiel

Forest soils harbor hyper-diverse microbial communities which fundamentally regulate carbon and nutrient cycling across the globe. Directly testing hypotheses on how microbiome diversity is linked to forest carbon storage has been difficult, due to a lack ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Echoing Swiss Coloniality. Land, Archive and Visuality between Brazil and Switzerland

Denise Bertschi

Informed by longstanding artistic practice, this doctoral thesis approaches entanglements of Swiss coloniality in Brazil and Switzerland under the lens of land, archive, and visuality. The enduring legacies of imperial capitalism in the former Colonia Leop ...

EPFL2024

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

Automated Design Appraisal: Estimating Real Estate Price Growth and Value at Risk Due to Local Development

Adam Robert Swietek

Financial criteria in architectural design evaluation are limited to cost performance. Here, I introduce a method – Automated Design Appraisal (ADA) – to predict the market price of a generated building design concept within a local urban context. Integrat ...

2023

Automation in steep terrain agriculture: an optimal controller to prevent tipping and slipping of tethered robots on slopes

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Max Mirko Polzin

Autonomous robots have the potential to fundamentally transform conventional farming methods, e.g. by enabling economically viable farming of sloped arable land. However, navigation on slopes in harsh conditions is challenging for robots as they must be pr ...

TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD2023

Transhistorical Urban Landscape as Hypermap

Valentine Bernasconi, Paul Robert Guhennec, Ludovica Schaerf

This article explores the conception, design, and implementation of a hypertextual map that we call hypermap. Using Giovanni Nolli's 1748 map of the city of Rome as a backbone, we conducted an experiment based on one of the routes defined by Giuseppe Vasi' ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023

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

Using machine learning to generate an open-access cropland map from satellite images time series in the Indian Himalayan region

Danya Li

Crop maps are crucial for agricultural monitoring and food management and can additionally support domain-specific applications, such as setting cold supply chain infrastructure in developing countries. Machine learning (ML) models, combined with freely-av ...

Elsevier2023

Consider the Anoxic Microsite: Acknowledging and Appreciating Spatiotemporal Redox Heterogeneity in Soils and Sediments

Vincent Noel, Meret Aeppli

Reduction-oxidation (redox) reactions underlie essentially all biogeochemical cycles. Like most soil properties and processes, redox is spatiotemporally heterogeneous. However, unlike other soil features, redox heterogeneity has yet to be incorporated into ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023