2021

Adrienne Grêt-Regamey, Michal Switalski and colleagues from Finland and the US wrote a new article on how to harness sensing data to steer urban transformation towards sustainability.

Between 2019 and 2021, raum+, on behalf of the canton and in collaboration with all the communes, has conducted the survey of the settlement area reserves in Valais.

Virtual Reality (VR) applications can be used for therapy of gait-impaired patients. At the Scientifica 2021, we demonstrate a prototype based on 3D point cloud simulations.

How do nature-based solutions (NbS) contribute to transformative change? The new journal article Assessing nature-based solutions for transformative change provides a framework with a novel classification to assess NbS with regard to transformative change. Assessed were 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). The results show that functioning NbS need to be equally based on nature as on the involved people.

In her thesis, Ana developed methods to account for uncertainty in assessments of ecosystem services (ES) using Bayesian Networks. She integrated remote sensing data, existing process-based and empirical models, and expert knowledge to model and map forest ES in the Swiss Alps.

The goals of Reto’s PhD project were to conduct a physiological laboratory experiment to better understand people’s perception of landscape changes through renewable energy systems, and to show how an evolutionary optimization algorithm can inform policy-makers in leveraging various planning policies to optimize wind energy production.

After one-and-a-half year of intermittent home office and Covid-lockdowns, the PLUS writing week could finally take place again. In the last week of June 2021, 25 PLUS members returned to the Saas Valley for a great week of writing proposals or publications, discussions and social events.

In a paper recently published in Sustainability Science, Nicolas Salliou and colleagues introduce the use of serious game as a tool to support scientists and stakeholders to identify problems worth solving together. They used this novel approach in French and Swiss Alps.

One year after the Project Week Landscape Development in Arth SZ - on International Biodiversity Day - one of the student projects was handed over to the public.

Feeling home and experiencing a sense of belonging are often the missing pieces of the puzzle for migrants and their well-being. Empirical evidence shows urban parks have the potential to help migrants generating 'Place attachment'. In research conducted in Iran, bicultural inhabitants express their feeling on how they perceive historical Persian gardens and modern parks.

In May 2021, four new doctoral students started at PLUS. Below, each one of them is briefly introduced as well as the projects they will be working on.

In a recently published paper in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, we investigated the usage of a participatory multi-objective optimization to plan new residential areas to accommodate urban dwellers. These planning procedures increasingly require the consideration of urban ecosystem services (UES), especially when taking into account the irreversibility of urban development.

The pandemic-resilient hybrid format of nudging social outdoor transformative action is offered both onsite at the MonViso institute and online.

End of 2020 saw the successful completion of the largest survey conducted at PLUS to date: 10’000 residents in the Netherlands offered their valuations on how they feel about over 7’000 different places they can experience day to day in typical Dutch landscapes.

In a paper recently published in Forest Ecology and Management, Ana Stritih and colleagues investigated the effects of land-use legacies and recent management on the susceptibility of mountain forests in Graubünden to natural disturbances.  

Visual landscape disruption is often a key argument against renewable energy infrastructure such as wind turbines and photovoltaic panels. But what defines visual disturbance in particular?