With glacier extinction, the whole environment undergoes various changes that, like an echo, spread to every system, natural and human.

In the exhibition The Echo of Glaciers at the Trento Film Festival, Sara's illustrations sprout on Matteo's photos to tell the story of ten plant species that may disappear following glacier extinction.

Further exhibitions and workshops are under construction.

Global environmental change, in particular rising temperatures, is causing glaciers to retreat and disappear worldwide. The disappearance of glaciers is followed by a total upheaval, with the colonization of pioneer plants, insects, and microorganisms. Yet, glacier extinction will also be followed by biodiversity loss and erosion of ecosystem functions. What role does art play in constructing discourses and scenarios? How can artists approach glacial ecosystems with a scientific point of view and contribute to public engagement? How can art and science collaborations shift our narratives and imaginary?

Intertwined destinies:  glaciers and their companion species is the new Art–Science project in partnership with visual artist Maëlle Cornut. Thanks to the support of PolARTS (Swiss Polar Institute and prohelvetia), we will exchange ideas and reflect on our shared theoretical concepts such as ecofeminism, decolonizing ecology, climate and environmental justice with the aim of  translating scientific questions, results, and implications into art works. 

An iconic sign of global warming is the retreat and extinction of glaciers worldwide. But glacier extinction will also be followed by the loss of species from ecological networks and local communities, with the inherent impoverishment of ecosystem functions. However, lack of comprehensive network-level studies impairs our ability to predict the fate of biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems on forelands of retreating glaciers.

Using cutting-edge analytical techniques, I plan to investigate ecological network dynamics and ecosystem functions in environments ranging from recently ice-free terrains to late stages of development on three glacier forelands in the Swiss Alps.

Thanks to this SNSF Ambizione grant, I will start the new Biodiversity Change group at University of Lausanne. The contribution IceNet will provide is crucial to understanding and predicting the fate of biodiversity and anticipating the consequences of global warming on species interactions and ecosystem functions. 

Ongoing climate change poses serious threats to biodiversity conservation and the sustainability of ecosystems.

The project 'Revisiting local adaptation to climate change 90 years after' involves revisiting the famous studies of local adaptation to climate change initiated by Stanford Professor Dr. H. M. Hall in the 1920’s and continued by California botanists Jens C. Clausen, William M. Hiesey, and David D. Keck in the 30’s. They showed, for the first time in history, how species evolve and locally adapt to different environments.

Our objective is to examine how evolution and local adaptation changed during this last century of changing climate conditions in yarrow (Achillea millefolium), an idiomatic plant popular in traditional ecological knowledge and native medicine. Thanks to the support of California National Parks and Forests, iNaturalist platform and Stanford Educational Farm, we are running common garden experiments and comparing current results with data published by Clausen and colleagues.

The outcome of this research will help us understand plants’ evolutionary response and adaptation to climate change.

Human activities are profoundly impacting life on Earth and increasingly threatening the functioning of ecosystems. Recent experimental studies have shown that deforestation and biodiversity loss are disrupting key ecosystem functions. Yet, we have a limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying the impact of these major anthropogenic perturbations on the functioning of ecosystems.

A possible solution to this problem is to examine how interactions between species in ecological communities which are subject to perturbations influence ecosystem functioning. This project is aimed at disentangling the consequences of deforestation and biodiversity loss for species coexistence, and the role of coexistence mechanisms in mediating ecosystem functioning of forest communities.

Addressing these questions will fill a key knowledge gap in understanding the impact of human activities on ecosystem functioning via their effects on species coexistence.

Rapid environmental change is causing unprecedented losses in biodiversity and threatens to disrupt key ecosystem services.

To address these challenges, it is critical to understand how biological communities respond to environmental changes. Over the past decade, ecological network theory has been developed and used by ecologists to analyse the structure and stability of species interactions.

This approach has shed light on coevolutionary processes that influence biodiversity and revealed general patterns across disparate ecosystems. However, the study of ecological networks still captures only a subset of interactions occurring in the ecosystems. Consequently, we have very limited understanding of the effects of environmental change on networks of species interactions across trophic levels.

This project aims to provide novel insights into the effects of environmental change on ecological networks.

The world is green thanks to the pivotal role plants play in structuring Earth ecosystems.

Plants can perceive and respond to their environment, like growing towards light and nutrients. Nevertheless, the role of plant-derived sensory cue in mediating complex ecological interactions among plants and between plants and other organisms is still poorly understood. As such, how information-mediated interactions scale up to communities and shape biodiversity remains poorly known.

If conspecific neighbors are under herbivore grazing, priming allows plants to prepare their defences in light of probable imminent attack. However, how priming affects plant performance (i.e., the cost of priming) and is still controversial; in turn, its ecological relevance (i.e., the outcome of plant–plant competition and facilitation) is under debate.

Drought, extreme temperatures and poor soils are some of the problems plants have to cope with to survive and reproduce.

Three decades ago, ecologists started to report that plants can cooperate with neighbouring species to survive under stressful conditions. Since then, hundreds of studies have been conducted looking at positive interactions — facilitation — in plant communities.

Nevertheless, few works have investigated the network of interactions among plant species and the consequences of these interactions for other trophic levels in the ecosystems. Consequently, it is unclear how plant interaction networks are assembled, how they respond to environmental change and how they are linked to other ecological networks.

My aim is to elucidate the nature of complex interactions among plants, the networks they build up and their interdependence with other ecological networks in the ecosystem.

Glaciers respond to changes in climate. Worldwide, glaciers are shrinking and receding. As glaciers wane, new terrain is exposed to colonisation by plants and animals.

These areas in front of retreating glaciers represent unique model systems for studying how ecosystems develop and addressing the effects of climate change on biological communities. Nonetheless, the consequences of glacier recession on pollination networks are overlooked.

I am interested in addressing the assembly processes of pollination networks and their functional implication for the stability of alpine ecosystems.

Addressing how pollination networks respond to glacier recession gradients helps understanding and projecting how biotic interactions and biodiversity vary in space and time.