Current members
Loïc’s research is focused on understanding and modelling past and future landscape dynamic and its link to biodiversity. His research provides fundamental knowledge in ecology and evolution of landscape biodiversity patterns and uses this knowledge to improve sustainable management of natural resources.
Lead scientist
Camille works at the interface of the research fields of biogeography, macroecology and evolution to understand the origin of marine biodiversity, its current distribution and its possible future under climate change and anthropogenic pressures. Camille investigates the spatial and temporal dynamics of marine assemblages by accounting for species identity, phylogenetic and functional diversity as well as the trophic interactions that connect species in ecosystems.
Teaching coordinator
Fabian is a lecturer and coordinates the teaching of the ecosystems and landscape evolution group. This includes several bachelor and master courses about environmental data science, eDNA for biodiversity monitoring, spatial analysis in R and basic and advanced landscape research. He is also involved in the coordination of two massive open online courses (MOOCs) about landscape ecology and environmental DNA (eDNA).
Wet-lab coordinator
Sarah is the wet lab coordinator, who will introduce everyone to the lab. She is the reference person in the group for the metabarcoding libraries development and optimisation. Her love of nature and being outdoors changed her focus to applying her skills from biotechnologies to monitoring biodiversity.
Ankara del Carmen Marjatshang-Chen
Ankara runs the institute secretariat for ITES and is administrative assistant for two Professorships within the Institute, including the Chair of Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution. Ankara provides day-to-day administrative support, her responsibilities include reporting to the management, handling human resources and finances, organising and scheduling events, and acting as the point of contact between employees, guests and the various ETH bodies and services.
Gilbert assists the group with server installation and administration for users, groups, mailing lists, and the network management including the security handling. He does the setup and maintenance of the websites. He is responsible for hardware procurement and handling and does the basic and user specific installations including updates with Baramundi, including handover to new end-users or to the lab. In addition, he provides the end-user support, especially fore the more difficult cases.
Meret is interested in the potential of environmental DNA (eDNA) as a powerful and rapidly evolving method for monitoring biodiversity in a time of rapid ecosystem change. The possibility of taking portable handheld devices into the field to generate real time data is an exciting prospect for her. It increases the ease of access to generating data and creating scientific insights without depending on large laboratories that are often far from sampling sites. Her role is to develop and test methods that are field deployable, aiming to achieve rapid results in various environments.
Damiano's research addresses empirical challenges in macroecology, such as the heterogeneity of observational data and sampling sparsity. By refocusing validations and models, he merges these data to tackle leading questions in species and biodiversity ecology. Within the WildinSync project, involving ancient DNA and climate specialists at ETH and WSL, he is developing the most fine-scaled temperature baseline of the world's oceans and shelf zone to date. This work will help map marine biodiversity distributions over past millennia and under the threat of climate change to strengthen conservation action by 2030.
Dr. Carolina Bello specializes in the role of animals in ecosystem services. Her research examines how global change alters species interactions and affects ecosystem functions, with a particular focus on carbon storage and disease control. At the EEL lab, Dr. Bello supports the BiotechQilombolo project by collecting eDNA samples in the Amazon with the active participation of local communities, helping to establish long-term biodiversity monitoring strategies. In addition, she is designing and implementing a new project to explore the role of mammals in transmitting vector-borne diseases, using iDNA sampling to uncover hidden links between wildlife and disease dynamics. By linking biodiversity conservation with ecosystem services, Dr. Bello’s research bridges fundamental ecology with policy-relevant solutions to address climate change and biodiversity loss simultaneously.
external page Virginie Marques
Virginie’s research focuses on integrating molecular ecology tools via the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to unravel the mechanisms shaping biodiversity patterns across ecosystems. Within the group, she is part of the SPI Greenfjord project, which plans to investigate the impact of melting glaciers on the marine ecosystem in Greenland fjords by relating physical properties and geochemical fluxes to biodiversity measured using eDNA metabarcoding. At the Arctic scale, she also aims at studying the spatial structure and drivers of marine food-webs properties.
Martina is interested in developing new methods for projects with an applied outcome. With her background in molecular biology she is therefore working on the CRISPeD project to help develop a CRISPR-Cas based method for rapid and efficient biodiversity monitoring via eDNA. Harnessing this novel approach should help advance real-time biodiversity and species monitoring.
Shuo’s research interests are monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem globally and improving large-scale biodiversity modeling with the combination of satellite imagery and ground data. He tries to understand the connection between land cover shift and biodiversity using Remote Sensing, Environmental DNA, and Machine Learning methods. For this, he applies Remote sensing to estimate Essential Biodiversity Variables (defined by GEO BON) and develops other co-variables that have tight relationships with biodiversity and Environmental DNA, then applies Machine Learning methods to biodiversity mapping.
As part of the BurGeoN project, Roos researches how geomorphology influences the dynamics of biodiversity in mountain regions, with a particular focus on South America. Her work bridges geology and ecology, exploring how tectonic activity shapes the landscape and drives changes in habitat and species diversity. To investigate this, she combines geomorphological analysis through remote sensing with environmental DNA and geological fieldwork data.
Antonin is a theoretical ecologist and evolutionary biologist. His research focuses on building theoretical tools to infer the potential of extraterrestrial environments to harbor extant life as well as to infer observables signatures left by extraterrestrial ecosystems that could be detected by probes or telescopes. His work bridges ecosystem and planetary sciences, astronomy, and geochemistry, exploring how Archaean ecosystems feedback onto their global environments over long time scales, establishing baseline expectations for biosignatures in the atmosphere of terrestrial exoplanets or in ocean material from icy moons. As an ETH-NOMIS fellow, Antonin researches whether the mechanisms that delayed the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere after the emergence of photosynthesis could lead to a high false negative rate when utilizing atmospheric oxygen as a biosignature.
Gordian Mataba
Dr. Gordian Mataba specializes in biological control of mosquito larvae to reduce population risk to mosquito borne diseases. At ETH Zurich Gordian’s research focuses on the potential role of environmental DNA (eDNA) for enhanced monitoring of pathogens and their vectors. This research with data from northern Tanzania aims to uncover the power of eDNA metabarcoding in monitoring and early detection of the presence of vectors and pathogens of medical and zoonotic importance, and in unravelling their geospatial distribution in relation to anthropogenic induced changes (land use, biodiversity, and the climate). With a background in aquatic ecology, Gordian aspires to device a novel vector and pathogen monitoring technique that can aid in efficient control of vectors that breed in water, particularly mosquitoes and snails.
Romane’s research focuses on the application of environmental DNA (eDNA) in marine ecosystems to explore spatial variations of biodiversity at different temporal scales. She investigates the evolution of taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity in marine communities across different types of ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea (tropical), Atlantic Ocean (temperate) and Arctic Ocean (polar), in areas under different levels of protection. She also aims to develop an innovative eDNA structure to perform autonomous sampling allowing to explore short-term temporal variations of biodiversity in those ecosystems.
Anouk investigates different monitoring methods for urban mammals, such as eDNA sampling, wildlife cameras and citizen science observations, based on their efficiency and effectiveness. She will analyze habitat and space use in squirrels and hedgehogs and other mammals in order to discover changes in distribution and abundance and to develop management and conservation strategies. The data analyzed in her dissertation has been collected in the citizen science projects StadtWildTiere and Wilde Nachbarn. Her dissertation is based at SWILD in Zurich and co-supervised by Prof. Loïc Pellissier (WSL and ETH), Prof. Holderegger (WSL) and Dr. Fabio Bontadina (SWILD).
Sherub’s research is focused on connecting the power of eDNA with spatial modelling in a landscape-scale wildlife assessment in Bhutan. A focus is given to developing spatial models to identify the area and period of Human-wildlife conflict using the occurrences data from eDNA. Moreover, through this research, he aims to advance eDNA-based monitoring of wildlife species to better understand their occupancy for management and conservation in Bhutan.
Sherub is currently a recipients of E4D Doctoral Scholarship and his research will be supervised by Prof. Loïc Pellissier (ETH).
Ilya has a background in aerospace engineering and machine learning algorithms for computer vision. His research is a collaboration with WSL Birmensdorf to automate eDNA sample collection in rainforest biomes using a multirotor drone. The research involves developing a novel tactile robot as well as control and planning systems for a cluttered environment. The vehicle uses computer vision and structural modeling techniques to estimate forces. This research is co-supervised by Prof. Stefano Mintchev (WSL) and Prof. Loic Pelissier (ETH).
Anna’s primary areas of interest are computational astrobiology and space biology. In her PhD, she is working on the Origins of Life (OoL) as part of the PANDORA project, which aims to create a geodynamic simulation of an Earth-like planet. Anna is in charge of integrating the OoL component into the simulation. Her approach involves synthesizing and analyzing all the simulation data to identify potential locations and conditions that could have allowed life to originate. She is also a member of the Polish Astrobiology Society and NASA GeneLab, where she engages in various astrobiology and space biology projects.
Merlin has a background in ecology and data science, with a special interest on bridging theoretical ecology with computational statistics and machine learning techniques to improve global inference and forecasting of biodiversity–environment interactions. In his PhD, he develops spatiotemporal biodiversity models by integrating diverse monitoring data (observational, molecular, and remote sensing) across varying resolutions of environmental predictors (space, time) and biodiversity responses (taxonomic, functional, phylogenetic). His work aims to improve our understand and the predictability of community turnover in the context of global change and to advance the utility of non-invasive techniques such as eDNA by calibrating them against established data sources.
Gayoung is a PhD student investigating the interplay between forests and agricultural productivity. Her research focuses on how the spatial distribution of land cover types influences one another, with particular attention to how the amount and configuration of adjacent forests affect crop yields. Using remote sensing data, she studies these dynamics across multiple spatial scales, from individual landscapes to the global level. Ultimately, her work aims to provide insights into how forest–agriculture interactions can be managed to support both sustainable food production and ecosystem conservation.
Josephine is interested in large-scale patterns and high levels of ecological organisation. Her PhD research is focussed on forest microclimate, exploring where and when global forests have local warming or cooling effects. This includes the influence of climatic conditions, as well as hydrology or landscape configuration. Using a combination of satellite data, as well as global networks of ground-based measurements, she is hoping to gain ecological insights, as well as provide information that can benefit practical climate adaptation.
Mauricio is a biologist with a master's degree in biological sciences and expertise in bioinformatics, genomics, and evolution. His research focuses on determining the geological influence on speciation, using plant species in the Colombian Andes as a model system, through the analysis of environmental DNA (eDNA).
Jean is a botanist, interested in how science can help to improve the understanding and protection of natural areas. For his PhD, he is part of the BurGeoN project (Bursting Speciation from Geological Dynamics in Mountains). In his research, he aims to use environmental DNA from rivers and soil samples from endemic regions of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest to identify connections between plant diversity, landscape change, and speciation. His research is being supervised by Prof. Loïc Pellissier at ETH Zürich.
Associated PhD students
Bastiaan researches links between aquatic and terrestrial food webs in Swiss forests. The structure of food webs is crucial for maintaining biodiversity, while this is heavily influenced by global changes, both in climate and land management. However, terrestrial, aquatic and interconnected food webs may respond differently to these changes. During his PhD project, Bastiaan will utilize field work, mesocosms, feeding experiments, stable isotope and fatty acid analysis in order to unravel the effects of forest management and climate change on links between aquatic and terrestrial food webs. Bastiaan’s PhD is a part of the Blue-Green Biodiversity project and he is supervised by prof. dr. Martin Gossner (WSL), prof. dr. Carsten Schubert (EAWAG) and prof. dr. Loïc Pelissier (ETH).
Rama’s project, in collaboration with the University of Zurich, College of Forestry Ponnampet, and ATREE, aims to understand the effect of land use change on shaping the structure of plant-pollinator interaction networks in the coffee agroforestry of India. Using a combination of advanced landscape mapping, observational data, pollen metabarcoding, and eDNA approaches, we aim to understand how the plant-pollinator network dynamics are affected by local and landscape-level transitions in the land use. The plausible causal pathways affecting the structure of plant pollinator interaction networks are also assessed. The outcomes of this work can inform better land management strategies to restore biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and resilience, and sustainable agricultural production.
Using fragments of insect DNA which remain on the surface of flowers, Daisy aims to identify the bee species which pollinate flowering trees growing in coffee agroforests in Kodagu, Western Ghats of India. By constructing plant-pollinator networks from this data we could detect changing interaction patterns resulting from intensification of land use and reductions in native tree diversity. It will also reveal whether landscape and local scale land use change effects bee species differently depending on their size and life history. Understanding the fragility of these pollination interactions could help inform land management to protect biodiversity and crop security.
Zhang Song
Song’s research focuses on monitoring changes in freshwater ecosystem biodiversity and using environmental DNA (eDNA) to enhance our understanding of biodiversity. For this, under both anthropogenic and natural factors, he aims to develop an interpretable artificial intelligence model by integrating environmental DNA with remote sensing satellite imagery, ultimately applying it to biodiversity mapping and analysis of its driving factors.
Jingyi's work mainly focuses on evaluating multi-decadal environmental impacts of marine aquaculture across China's ten coastal provinces. She has quantified the greenhouse gas emissions and sequestration capabilities of various marine aquaculture species, as well as nitrogen discharges and removals. This crucial quantification was achieved through the powerful integration of detailed aquaculture data and comprehensive information from statistical yearbooks. On this basis, she also used the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) database to simulate twelve different scenarios, predicting potential future trends in environmental fluxes for each province up to the year 2100. The next phase of her research will harness the power of remote sensing data to facilitate a deeper analysis, focusing on spatially explicit assessments of aquaculture's environmental impact and the identification of key anthropogenic and natural drivers.