Still one of my favorite parts of the job: brainstorming at the whiteboard

Potatoes 🥔 in a forest stream: the ultimate tracer of overland flow from upstream agricultural fields. Took us a while to figure this out.

“This one bird nest that we found turned out to be like a history book" 🪶 Thanks @eos.org for including my research in this article! 🐦🧪

Eos@eos.org · 8mo ago

Nobody *likes* pollution…but sometimes it has its uses as a research tool.

Finally a meteorologic+soil sensor station on the UNIL campus. Real-time data visualizations will be made publicly available in 2026. This is a first step towards making our campus an environmental observatory for teaching, research and scientific outreach.

Our ability to figure out how old stream water is relies almost entirely on environmental tracers. But stable water isotopes rarely tell us anything about water parcels older than 1–2 years, and even tritium often doesn’t push that limit much further dx.doi.org/10.1029/2025....

Limits to the Estimation of Old Streamwater in Catchments Using Environmental Tracers

Estimating the age of older stream waters is limited by weak tracer signals and uncertainty We propose a general framework to identify the maximum water age that can be reliably determined using ...

dx.doi.org

I am looking for simple teaching material on watershed delineation in English. On the web there is a lot of material but I find it rather software-oriented. I'm looking for material that illustrates general concepts in a software-agnostic way. Does anyone have suggestions?

If you were a hydrologist interested in stream water quality, and you had some residual 10'000 $ that you can use for buying a cool instrument (e.g. another sensor, autosampler, or accessories), what would you get?

Coquet river near Longframlington, Northumberland, UK. Sometimes I wish I could have a research proposal featuring all the nice rivers I come across.

The first urban runoff after a few dry weeks can be very dirty, and it ususally goes straight into the river. The one in the movie is not an isolated spill: all the roads I crossed were the same color.

Scientists at UNIL have created a unique 3D visualization model showing the evolution of glacier cover in Switzerland since the last great ice age, and into the near future. The installation be on display at the Osaka World Expo in Japan!infos here: www.unil.ch/news/1750355...

The new Ecotron system manufactured by UGT and funded by the UNIL Faculty of Geoscience and the Environment @fgse-unil.bsky.social is operational! It's a rather big machine with a very big potential for ecohydrological experimentation.

Five years ago, an experiment began at ETH Hönggerberg: researchers set up an outdoor laboratory in the forest. They used sensors positioned in trees, the soil and in a stream to study water dynamics. ETH News accompanied the head of the experiment, Marius Floriancic. ethz.ch/en/news-and-...

Old water, new insights

Five years ago, an experiment began at ETH Hönggerberg: researchers set up an outdoor laboratory in the forest near the campus. They used sensors positioned in trees, the soil and in a stream to study...

ethz.ch

Congratulations to Xavier Dupla, Ph.D. candidate in our institute, for successfully defending his thesis and coming up with the sentence "Soil fertility is like love: everyone knows what it means but no one can define what it is"

The negotiations between Wiley and the Swissuniversities consortium are discontinued (shorturl.at/u6RZq). Swiss researchers are recommended to not submit to and review for Wiley journals, which include all AGU journals, Ecohydrology, Hydrological Processes and WIREs Water among others.

MS Student Alessio Nembrini showing Ilja van Meerveld his ongoing work: a continuous-tracer injection device to estimate streamflow and stage-discharge rates. The initially evident fluorescein is hardly visible after ~50 m as it mixes with the stream water. The fluorometer is 200 m downstream.

Youri Rothfuss (Federal Research Center in Julich, Germany) presenting us their lab on wheels: the IsoMobile. What a wonderful mobile infrastructure to measure water stable isotopes in-situ!

Don’t wait out four hard years: speak truth to power

Don’t wait out four hard years: speak truth to power

The importance of diversity in science is an unshakeable reality that the scientific community must stand by.

nature.com

With @ethzurich.bsky.social colleagues & friends, we decided to #StandUpForScience this afternoon to express our support for our US colleagues. Science is a common good. Thanks to all those who joined so spontaneously! @usyseth.bsky.social @eth-eaps.bsky.social @standupforscience.bsky.social

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025! Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide! #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

Excited about our #AI based runoff reconstruction for #switzerland ranging back to 1962. Lead by @bask0.bsky.social, co-authored by @hydrologywsl.bsky.social , @soniaseneviratne.bsky.social , William Aeberhard, Michael Schirmer. hess.copernicus.org/articles/29/...

The word "resistance" bears significant historical values. To me, honoring those values today means being moderate and struggle to remain so. Both in life and science.

For folks interested in all aspects of the earth's Critical Zone: this June in Finland there will be the first eLTER conference. There are a lot of interesting sessions in the program (elter-ri.eu/science-conf...) plus field excursions to some of the best examples of eLTER instrumented sites.

I love to talk science with colleagues, but I've been attending less conferences. This year I want to use this platform to promote some small science discussions that I cannot have in person.