Andreas Fischlin

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• MS., PhD., Prof.
• Professor Emeritus at ETH Zurich

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports provide policy-relevant insights about climate impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation through a process of peer-reviewed literature assessments underpinned by expert judgement. An iconic output from these assessments is the burning embers diagram, first used in the Third Assessment Repor...

This is the Summary for Policy Makers of the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, as approved by the IPCC member countries at the Plenary in Monaco, 25 September 2019.

The cryosphere (including, snow, glaciers, permafrost, lake and river ice) is an integral element of high mountain regions, which are home to roughly 10% of the global population. Widespread cryosphere changes affect physical, biological and human systems in the mountains and surrounding lowlands, with impacts evident even in the ocean. Building on...

Mehr als 70 Schweizer Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler haben in den letzten drei Jahren zusammen mit ProClim – dem Forum für Klima und globalen Wandel der Akademie der Naturwissenschaften Schweiz (SCNAT) – und unterstützt durch das Beratende Organ für Fragen der Klimaänderung OcCC sowie das Bundesamt für Umwelt BAFU die für die Schweiz rele...

Research as a digital enterprise has created new, often poorly addressed challenges for the management and curation of research to ensure continuity, transparency, and accountability. There is a common misunderstanding that curation can be considered at a later point in the research cycle or delegated or that it is too burdensome or too expensive d...

This article presents a general methodology for modeling complex dynamic systems focusing on sustainability properties that emerge from tracking energy flows.We adopt the embodied energy (emergy) concept that traces all energy transformations required for running a process. Thus, energy at any process within a system is studied in terms of all the...

Executive summary During the course of this century the resilience of many ecosystems (their ability to adapt naturally) is likely to be exceeded by an unprecedented combination of change in climate, associated disturbances (e.g., flooding, drought, wildfire, insects, ocean acidification) and in other global change drivers (especially land-use ch...

This article presents a general methodology for modeling complex dynamic systems, focusing on sustainability properties that emerge from tracking energy flows. We adopt the embodied energy (emergy) concept that traces all energy transformations required for running a process. Energy can therefore be studied in terms of all energy previously investe...

Der öffentliche Diskurs zum Klimawandel krankt am Missbrauch von Unsicherheiten: Unhaltbare Zweifel erhalten immer noch breiten Raum; naturwissenschaftliche Ergebnisse werden einer seits überbewertet und andererseits verzerrt ausgelegt, indem Unsicherheiten ausge blendet werden. Dabei bleibt die Debatte über die Risiken auf der Strecke, obwohl mit...

In a meta-analysis we integrate peer-reviewed studies that provide quantified estimates of future projected ecosystem changes related to quantified projected local or global climate changes. In an advance on previous analyses, we reference all studies to a common pre-industrial base-line for temperature, employing up-scaling techniques where necess...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

To globally protect the climate effectively it is necessary to include forests as a key element of the global carbon cycle for two reasons: Firstly, deforestation has contributed roughly one third of anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the onset of industrialisation and continues to significantly exacerbate climate change, in particular in the South....

Prominent construction projects in Switzerland, such as the Sawiris luxury resort in Andermatt planned by Orascom Hotels & Development, Cairo (Egypt), or the idea of a hotel and apartment tower at Schatzalp, Davos, demonstrate how rapidly Alpine landscapes may undergo major changes. Decisions on whether or not such changes are supported by policyma...

Prominent construction projects, such as the planned "Sawiris luxury resort" by Orascom Hotels & Development (OHD), Cairo (Egypt) in Andermatt, Switzerland, or the idea of a hotel and apartment tower at Schatzalp, Davos, Switzerland, demonstrate how rapidly Alpine landscapes may undergo major changes (Box 1). Decisions on whether or not such change...

With landscapes there is no room for experimentation. Real changes to the landscape become an indelible part of it – mostly for decades or even centuries. That is why level-headed and foresighted planning is required before final decisions are made. Computer-based models allow the testing and visualization of development options and decision altern...

Landschaften bieten keinen Raum für Experimente. Was in ihnen realisiert wird, bildet – meist für Jahrzehnte oder gar für Jahrhunderte – einen unauslöschlichen Teil von ihnen. Bevor endgültige Entscheide gefällt werden, ist deshalb umsichtige und vorausschauende Planung gefordert. Computergestützte Modelle erlauben es, Entwicklungsoptionen und Ents...

The complexities inherent in land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities have led to contentious and prolonged debates about the merits of their inclusion in the 2008–2012 first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Yet the inclusion of these activities played a key role in agreement on the general framework of the Kyoto Protocol,...

Many pathways have been proposed for including land use in a post-2012 climate agreement. Several involve new accounting structures which are quite different from the rules established in the Marrakech Accords and related decisions. However, a mechanism based largely on the structure agreed for the first commitment period also has its benefits. Thi...

The complexities inherent in land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities have led to contentious and prolonged debates about the merits of their inclusion in the 2008–2012 first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. Yet the inclusion of these activities played a key role in agreement on the general framework of the Kyoto Protocol,...

Spatio-temporal patterns of cyclic larch bud moth population densities, for instance synchrony (valley scale) and travelling waves (Alpine arc scale), have been observed at different scales and may be related to distinct causes. In this study, quantification of population data through cross-correlation analysis and spectral analysis revealed that l...

There is growing evidence that, as a result of global climate change, some of the most severe weather events could become more frequent in Europe over the next 50 to 100 years. The paper aims to (i) describe observed trends and scenarios for summer heat waves, windstorms and heavy precipitation, based on results from simulations with global circula...

This paper presents a new approach of spatiotemporally visualizing the simulation output of migratory insect dynamics and resultant vegetation changes in real-time. The visualization is capable of displaying simulated ecological phenomena in an intuitive manner, which allows research results to be easily understood by a wide range of users. In orde...

Environmental processes often vary in space and time and act over several scales. Current software applications dealing with aspects of these processes emphasize properties specific to their domain and tend to neglect other issues. For example, GIS prefers a static view and generally lacks the representation of dynamics, temporal simulation systems...

Consider a series (Xt) t such that the ratio of two successive values X t+1 X t is a stationary variable. We introduce two growth rates, the average growth rate ¯ R and the long-term growth rate ρ. The behavior of the aver-age growth rate is standard, since it is always asymptotically normal, with a variance that can be computed. We show that the a...

Population cycles have been remarkably resistant to explanation, in part because crucial experiments are rarely possible on appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Here we show how new approaches to nonlinear time-series analysis can distinguish between competing hypotheses for population cycles of larch budmoth in the Swiss Alps: delayed effects...

The population dynamics of the larch budmoth (LBM), Zeiraphera diniana, in the Swiss Alps are perhaps the best example of periodic oscillations in ecology (figure 7.1). These oscillations are characterized by a remarkably regular periodicity, and by an enormous range of densities experienced during a typical cycle (about 100,000-fold difference bet...

Adaptation potential of forests to rapid climatic changes can be assessed from vegetation dynamics during past climatic changes as preserved in fossil pollen data. However, pollen data reflect the integrated effects of climate and biotic processes, such as establishment, survival, competition, and migration. To disentangle these processes, we compa...

While the estimation of the carrying capacity of red deer (Cervus elaphus L.) in the Swiss National Park until now was based on seasonal mean phytomass productivity, we present a new approach which accounts for seasonal changes in the vegetation and the physiology of red deer during a growing season. Our approach roots in an individual-based simula...

Timescales of soil organic carbon (SOC) turnover in forests were investigated with soil radiocarbon data. The 12C/14C ratios were measured by accelerated mass spectroscopy on soil sampled from a deciduous temperate forest in Switzerland during 1969-1995. The resulting Delta14C values (125-1740/00) were in line with previously published 14C soil dat...

Local effects of climate change (CC) and elevated CO 2 (2 × CO 2 , 660 μmol mol –1 ) on managed temperate grasslands were assessed by forcing a dynamic ecosystem model with weather scenarios. The aims of the study were to compare the relative importance of individual and combined effects of CC, 2 × CO 2 , and photosynthetic acclimation, and to asse...

Individual based, stochastic forest patch models have the potential to realistically describe forest dynamics. However, they are mathematically intransparent and need long computing times. We simplified such a forest patch model by aggregating the individual trees on many patches to height-structured tree populations with theoretical random dispers...

Studies that use simulation models to assess possible regional impacts of climatic change have very diverse and demanding requirements for climatic input data. This paper presents a general method to construct climatic scenarios for such studies. It was developed in the context of several case studies dealing with possible climatic impacts on fores...

Nonlinear temperature dependence plays a major role in a large variety of ecological models. For the sake of simplicity and efficiency, the temperature dependence functions in many models are calculated for monthly or yearly time intervals, using temperature means or interpolations between means as input. As a consequence, information about the var...

Rates of ecological processes are usually influenced by temperature. For simplicity and efficiency of ecosystem models it is often necessary to summarize information about temperature dependence from short, e.g., hourly, time intervals over longer, e.g. monthly, time periods, i.e. to calculate long term expected values of dependence functions. This...

This paper presents a method to project quantitatively the possible impacts of climatic change on mountain forests at high temporal (annual cycle), spatial, and qualitative resolution. It allows linkage from global scenarios simulated by climate models through local climatic scenarios to stand-specific forest models. The method was applied to four...

The System Ecology Reports consist of preprints and technical reports. Preprints are articles, which have been submitted to scientific journals and are hereby made available to interested readers before actual publication. The technical reports allow for an exhaustive documentation of important research and development results. Die Berichte der Sys...

The forest model ForClim was used to evaluate the applicability of gap models in complex topography when the climatic input data is provided by a global database of 0.5° resolution. The analysis was based on 12 grid cells along an altitudinal gradient in the European Alps. Forest dynamics were studied both under current climate as well as under fou...

During the last 25 years, models of the jabowa/foret type (‘gap models’) were increasingly applied to study forest succession. By adding more and more details, they have grown to rather complex systems, but little is known about the importance of the numerous ecological processes included in the models and about their exact mathematical properties...

The crop-growth model for potatoes by Johnson et al. (1986) was adapted for use within a decision support and forecasting system for seed potato production and coupled to a soil water-balance model in order to simulate growth under suboptimal hydrological conditions. The original model produced outputs that deviated largely from field data for cult...

In the current debate on global climatic change, forests and forestry policies have gained much attention; in particular hope has been expressed that forestry policies have the potential to mitigate climatic change—at least partially (Sedjo and Solomon 1988; Sedjo 1989b; Johnson 1992; Kauppi 1992; Krapfenbauer 1992; Kurz et al. 1992; Marland and Ma...

Decisions on land-use and forest management can have a significant effect on the global carbon (C) budget. In order to evaluate the effect of land use and forest management decisions on the global C balance, or to assess the potential for positive change, we need not only to evaluate the current and near-term status of forests, but also to understa...

An analysis of the climate parametrization scheme adopted by conventional forest gap models revealed that most models assume a constant climate and are difficult to calibrate consistently. Tree growth showed unrealistically sensitive threshold effects along ecological gradients of temperature and precipitation. A new parametrization was compared wi...

Pathosystems of vector-borne plant viruses consist of the elements viruses, vectors and plants, influenced by man and the natural environment. Most virus epidemic models emphasize the importance of vectors and viruses, but do not consider the role of the plants. The model ‘EPOVIR’ is the first virus epidemic model coupled to a crop-growth submodel...

We compared six plant-soil models from the literature which describe the C-dynamics in forests and include climatic forcing explicitly. Our selection included the two physiological models FOREST-BGC and TCX, the ecosystem/population model FORCLIM, two ecosystem/ tissue models, MBL-GEM and CENTURY Forest and the global model TEM. The review revealed...

According to the requirements of various ecosystem models, at each location 17 seasonal statistics related to daily temperatures, precipitation, sunshine duration, air humidity and wind speed were considered. Year-to-year variations of the local variables were linked by means of Canonical Correlation Analysis to simultaneous anomalies in the North...

In the last two decades, forest succession models of the JABOWA/FORET type ("gap models") have grown to rather complex models. This makes simulation studies tedious, not the least because of the long simulation times and the inflexibility in experimenting with model modi- fications. Thus, only little could be learned about the relative importance o...

Many systems dealt with in environmental sciences such as ecology or environmental biology could be easily modelled and efficiently simulated on personal computers or on workstations. Thanks to their graphical capabilities such computers make it possible to model systems interactively, e.g. supported by graphical structure editors, or allow for int...

A frame program generator written in Modula-2 is presented, which allows an automatic generation of dialogs of interactive learning programs based on the “series-parallel-repetition” user model. The formal description of a dialog program serves as input, and a Modula-2 source program is produced. The generated program is built up of empty dynamic p...

During the late 1940s, immediately after World War II, the lush green forests of the Engadine Valley, high in the Swiss Alps, turned an ugly red-brown in the midst of the tourist season. This was due to a spectacular outbreak of the larch budmoth, Zeiraphera diniana Guenée (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae). Preparing for a revival of the tourist industry,...

A wide range of possibilities exists for the use of computers in the teaching of control system design and simulation. Several approaches such as the use of program packages, single purpose programs or complete environments are described in the paper. Experience gained from teaching with these methods is summarized, and recommendations for forther...

The DevelopmentofInteractive Modelling and SimulationSoftwareWith Modula-2: The sensible usage of interactive modelling and simulation software on personal computers and modem working stations requires modifications of traditional approaches and conventional software architectures mainly for two reasons: todays requirements for a modem man-machine...

There are various ways to analyze ecosystems. No approach is unanimously accepted (Ruesink 1976; Getz and Gutierrez 1982). One alternative to this seemingly unresolvable dispute is to analyze past experience in order to learn from it. A fair assessment of any scientific approach would be to compare its achievements with its initial objectives as de...

Computers play a constantly increasing role in college teaching. Various basic questions are asked about setting the objectives and the organization of instruction programs. The languages and authority systems playing a central role in the development of teaching software are considered in detail. Some examples are given to complete the theoretical...

Diss. Nr. 6977 Naturwiss. ETH Zürich.

Temporal dynamics of the larch bud moth (lbm), a cyclic forest defoliator in the European Alps, have been extensively researched and modelled. This study aims for the spatio-temporal modelling of lbm defoliation as related to landscape heterogeneity across a hierarchy of scales. A spatio-temporal lbm model has been constructed, which combines local...

High altitude plants are well adapted to their present environment (Komer 1992), but their ability to adapt to the changes in climate expected over the next century remains uncertain (Guisan, Holten, Tessier et aL 1995). Chapter 3 presented a few glimpses of plants and ecosystems' reactions to chang­ ing climates in the past. Chapter 5 reviewed the...

Simulations were carried out for 12 representative Swiss sites (7) over 10'000 years. We considered sinusoidal, annually uniform fluctuations in the expected values of monthly mean temperature and/or precipitation that were superposed on the average present-day climate after the model had reached steady state (simulation year 1'200). We evaluated f...