ETH Zurich is an engineering, science, technology, mathematics and management university in the City of Zurich, Switzerland. ETH has more than 17,000 students from approximately 80 countries, 3,800 of whom are doctoral candidates. More than 400 professors teach and conduct research in the areas of engineering, architecture, mathematics, natural sciences, system-oriented sciences, and management and social sciences. ETH Zurich regularly appears among the top-ranked universities worldwide with 21 Nobel Prizes having been awarded to students or professors of the Institute in the past, the most famous of them being Albert Einstein in 1921, and the most recent being Richard F. Heck in 2010.
The chair PLUS (Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems) focuses on developing and testing innovative collaborative decision-support systems balancing the use of natural resources against their availability in order to insure the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The research includes fundamental contributions to new spatial decision-support systems integrating ecosystem services and spatial modelling with new approaches including Bayesian Networks, inverse approaches and data assimilation, as well as GIS-based 3D visualizations of landscapes in participative approaches for socio-ecological system modelling.
Principal Investigator:
Adrienne Grêt-Regamey is Professor of Landscape and Environmental Planning. Her research focuses on integrating cross-governance and cross-scale assessments of socio-ecological systems and their ecosystem services for the development of sustainable landscape development solutions. She specialises in spatial modelling including Bayesian Networks, development of new scenario techniques including backcasting, the development of collaborative spatial decision support systems, and GIS-based landscape visualizations. She contributed and is contributing to many research projects integrating ecosystem services into decision-support instruments, economic assessments and institutional arrangements (e.g. FP7 OPERA, Natural capital/TEEB Germany, EU MESEU, Valuing Biodiversity with ecosystem services, Ecosystem services-based planning tools for Switzerland, Swiss NRP48 – ALPSCAPE, Swiss NRP61-Hydrological ecosystem services, Swiss NRP54 – Ecosystem services in agglomerations, NRP65 – Sustainable urban patterns, MOUNTLAND I and II: Ecosystem services in mountainous regions).
Her role in Ecopotential is leader of Task 7.3.