Blog

Read our blog to learn about the how, why, and who of Crowther Lab.

Top Tips for PhD students

Top Tips for PhD students

Is a PhD in science worth it? Yes! Read more on why a PhD is important, and even more importantly – our top tips by Lidong Mo and Haozhi Ma for PhD students at Crowther Lab, ETH Zurich.

Cities of the future: what will our world look like with climate change?

Cities of the future: what will our world look like with climate change?

Our climate future Millions marching the streets, daily articles in every newspaper and a biodiversity agreement in Montreal: the topic of climate change is on all our minds. The problem: We only have...

Inside the conferences meant to save the world

Inside the conferences meant to save the world

Giacomo Delgado, master’s student at our lab, visited both COP27 in Egypt and COP15 in Canada last year – his first time at any COP. The events left a curious impression on him. Here he shares an...

Costa Rica leading the movement for environmental transparency

Costa Rica leading the movement for environmental transparency

At COP27, Costa Rica sends a message to the world, we can’t achieve the Paris Agreement without nature. To accelerate investment in Nature-based Solutions, it is essential to bring transparency to�...

Integrating indigenous experience into ecology

Integrating indigenous experience into ecology

Humans and nature need each other to be healthy Earlier this year, IPBES (an Intergovernmental body focused on the science-policy interface for biodiversity) released a groundbreaking report on nature...

Prevalence and drivers of abrupt vegetation shifts in global drylands

Prevalence and drivers of abrupt vegetation shifts in global drylands

Protecting these vulnerable ecosystems requires understanding how humans impact their resilience Drylands are home to 2.1 billion people, and harbor some of the world’s rarest biodiversity. Globally...

Defending Earth’s terrestrial microbiome

Defending Earth’s terrestrial microbiome

New research shows that native soil microbiome restoration can accelerate plant biomass production by 64% on average, across ecosystems. This study reveals that working with healthy microbial communit...

Follow the fungi: sampling soil microbiome in the heart of Wales

Follow the fungi: sampling soil microbiome in the heart of Wales

Lab technician Laura Gobelius visited the largest existing soil fungi inoculation experiment site to date. Three days in the field filled with environmental and technical challenges – and the fun of collaborating with scientists all over the world.

10 things we learned from SERE 2022: the insightful, the surprising and the inspiring

10 things we learned from SERE 2022: the insightful, the surprising and the inspiring

Assistant Scientists Kathi Runge & Camille Fournier de Laurière recently participated in the 13th European Conference on Ecological Restoration (SERE 2022). Here’s their top 10 takeaways!

How to measure an ecosystem’s resilience?

How to measure an ecosystem’s resilience?

Time is critical to understanding resilience. We think nature changes slowly; it doesn’t always. If you take a walk in a forest, you observe many details of that landscape: it might feature a wide v...