Land use decisions bring together people with different priorities, experiences, and ideas about what landscapes should provide. Our team has been exploring how serious games can help people and organisations navigate these differences in Scotland, and find common ground through experiencing what it’s like to manage and make decisions about land.
“One of the best courses that I took at ETH” is how one student described the Applied Ecosystem Management field course, which brings students from various ETH study programmes together for 10 days in Dimitrovgrad, Serbia.
From India’s agroforests to Scotland’s soils: over the past six months, SPROUT PhD students Erika and Alex, together with research assistant Valeria, have spent long stretches of time in the Western Scottish Highlands for the first season of fieldwork. Their projects seek to understand how native woodland restoration shapes both the abiotic and biotic properties of the region’s organic-rich soils.
For eight weeks, Daisy and Rama, PhD students from POLNET, explored the coffee landscapes of Coorg, India, known for its biodiversity-friendly farms. Hosted by the College of Forestry in Ponnampet, they began fieldwork to identify case study areas and observe plants and pollinators — part of POLNET’s study on how landscape management and intensification affect pollination in agroforestry systems.
Maura Ganz is happy to present her research at the ETH Food Day 2025, which is about Planting Healthier Nutrition. She studies how diversification efforts in conventionally managed Swiss farming systems affect biodiversity, yield and biotic pest control. This knowledge is essential for agroecological policies that promote sustainable land use and resilient food production, directly supporting SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 15 (Life on Land).