Sibyl Huber from PLUS wins a Silver Medal for an outstanding Doctoral thesis at the ETH
Outstanding Master’s and doctoral theses from ETH students are honored with the Silver Medal of ETH Zurich together with a financial sum. Only eight percent of all ETH PhD thesis are awarded per year.
Sibyl’s thesis on “Social-ecological modeling of Alpine ecosystem services” aimed to develop a social-ecological model that integrates ecosystem services supply and demand and to apply it to a mountain case study in the Alps. The results suggest that different trade-offs will emerge in the mountain areas in the future and that society therefore has to address the questions of whether maintenance of the (currently preferred) status quo of Ecosystem Service provision is efficient, sustainable, and desirable in the longer term and whether it is useful to continue the chosen pathway of high governmental financial aid for farmers and reliance on their second income from tourism.
The application of the developed model should advance our understanding of global change impacts and disturbances on mountain social-ecological systems and help find alternative transformation pathways which can maintain a desired level of ecosystem services. This is why the socio-ecological model developed through her thesis currently consist the basis for a follow-up project on mountain ecosystem services, which aims at investigating how we can infer stable and instable states of future ecosystem provision with the help of social-ecological models.
