News

1st October 2023

Prof. Dr. Christine Eriksen und Prof. Dr. Viginia Ruiz-Villanueva

Two new professors at GIUB

Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva has been recently appointed as an Assistant Professor Tenure Track in Geomorphology and Natural Hazards in August 2023. Virginia is a fluvial geomorphologist, and she has worked extensively on analyzing natural hazards and cascade processes in mountain areas, emphasizing flood dynamics, hillslope-channel coupling, and the feedback and interactions between flow-sediment-vegetation. Before joining GIUB, Virginia was part of the Geosciences and Environment Faculty at the University of Lausanne as a SNSF Eccellenza Professor, where she still has part of her team. In her work, Virginia combines a field approach with remote sensing, and numerical modelling. Her work aims at developing new methods for monitoring and modeling fluvial processes, helping design effective management strategies, and informing sustainable environmental policies.

Christine Eriksen is heading up a new Geographies of Disasters group at GIUB as part of her SNSF Consolidator Grant, “Building Wildfire Resilient Communities in Europe (FiRES)”. A human geographer by training, Christine worked at the University of Wollongong, Australia and the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich before joining GIUB in August 2023. Her widely published and award-winning research has for the past two decades examined how people’s capacity to cope with wildfires are shaped by local knowledge, cultural norms, political agendas, land use and climatic changes.

16 October 2023

Feldarbeit am Viktoriasee

Lake sediments reveal insight into adaptive species radiation

Lake Victoria, East Africa, is a hotspot of young and massive species radiation. In less than 16,000 years, more than 500 species of cichlid fish have evolved. Fossil fish teeth preserved in lake sediments provide detailed insight into the process and timing of the adaptive radiation. Apparently, cichlid fish diversification is closely related to the infilling history of Lake Victoria in the Latest Pleistocene. Lake Voctoria was completely desiccated 17,000 years ago.

1st November 2023

COST Plant Metals Logo

COST Action PLANTMETALS Video

The Soil Science unit is part of the COST Action PLANTMETALS and in an effort to disseminate knowledge, a vulgarisation video was produced about the importance of trace elements in soils & plants and showcase which laboratory methods are used to analyse these trace elements. This 10 min videos is very helpful to understand some of the research conducted in the Soil Science Unit. Also, you will find some footage from the cLAB featuring our own Ms. Andrea Weber and Dr. Lorenz Gfeller at about 5:00 in the video.

5 December 2023

Relief Maps+: New Tools for Collecting, Analysing and Visualizing Intersecting Inequalities From an Emotional and Geographic Perspective

Prof. Dr. Maria Rodó-Zárate (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
Berner Humangeographisches Kolloquium
(14:15 – 15:45, room 002, GIUB)

Organized by the Units:
Social and Cultural Geography / Economic Geography /
Critical Sustainibility Studies /
Political Urbanism and Sustainable Spatial Development
in cooperation with the mLAB of the Institute of Geography

6 December 2023

Presentation: «Enhanced Transports from Land-to-Ocean: Towards Boundless Assessments of Carbon and Nitrogen Cycles»

Dr. Fabrice Lacroix (University of Bern)
Colloquium in Climatology, Climate Impact and Remote Sensing
(14:15 – 15:15, seminar room 124, Mittelstrasse 43 / Uni Mittelstrasse or Zoom Room: Link)
To participate via Zoom, a password is required. The password can be requested via e-mail.