Date:  Wednesday, 2 April 2025
Time:

• 9:00 Lima-Quito-Bogotá
• 10:00 La Paz
• 11:00 Santiago-Buenos Aires
• 16:00 CEST

Presentations

“Protecting mountain water systems”
Estefanía Quenta  –  Postdoctoral Fellow, Imperial College London
Estefanía is an environmental scientist focused on the response of freshwater ecosystems to environmental change. Her current research examines the impact of glacial retreat on water quality in Andean rivers, analyzing the presence of trace metals and their implications for human and ecosystem health.

“Applying Ecohydraulics to the River of Seven Colors”
 Andrés Vargas Luna  –  Associate Professor, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia)
An expert in fluvial morphodynamics and river engineering, Professor Vargas Luna researches the interaction between water flows and vegetation, as well as environmental restoration of rivers. In this webinar, he will present his work on ecohydraulics in the “River of Seven Colors,” exploring how interventions in these ecosystems can improve their conservation and resilience.

Register now and be part of this essential conversation about the future of our rivers and glaciers!

Sign up here or register on the official Conéctate A+ website.

Cover photo by Wikimedia user Mario Carvajal.

Join them for each webinar via zoom link here.

Upcoming Webinars

“Geospatial Data to Support Hazard Mitigation and Response in Alaska”
14 November 2024 at 9:00 Alaska time
Gary Greenberg
Alaska Map Company

Communities of Alaska are prone to natural hazards but often lack access to current and accurate geospatial data to plan for, mitigate and respond to these hazards efficiently. Regional or federal organizations may have available hazard data but local infrastructure data is often absent, creating an incomplete picture of the risk. Completing the picture will require collaboration across the various stakeholders to elevate the capacity though standards and processes making accessible tools and data otherwise missing. In this presentation, I will be going over examples of Alaskan communities using geospatial tools and common datasets required, and often absent, to respond to natural hazards from mitigation to recovery to help inform the development of a critical piece of the permafrost framework.

Alaska Tribal Landfills: Permafrost Data Needs
5 December 2024 at 9:00 Alaska time
Sela Tahiry
Environmental Protection Agency

Solid waste practices employed by rural Alaskan tribal governments may be contributing to human and environmental health impacts, which may be exacerbated with the loss of permafrost and increased erosion. In some communities, human waste, household hazardous waste, and electronic waste are co-mingled with typical solid waste in Class III landfills. The landfill heat and loss of permafrost may be causing the transport of contaminants into land and water resources. Determining a conceptual site model for each landfill is a priority to determine the fate and transport of the potential contaminants of concern but the lack of subsurface data is an obstacle.

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

Invited speaker Ana Ochoa-Sánchez graduated in Civil Engineering and holds a master’s and a doctoral degree in Water Resources. She joined the MRI’s Mentoring and Training Programme in IPCC Processes for Early Career Mountain Researches in 2019, where she had the opportunity to become a contributing author for the AR6 IPCC Report, Mountains Chapter. She is currently working as an Associate Professor at the University of Azuay. Her research interests include ecohydrology and climate change.

In this lecture, Ana discusses evidence of observed changes in natural and human systems in the Andes (detection) and their attribution to anthropogenic climate change. Mountains are among the areas most vulnerable to climate change impacts; therefore, monitoring the advance of anthropogenic influence in the climate and consequently on physical (cryosphere and water), biological (agriculture, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems), and human (energy, disasters, tourism, migration, human health and community changes and cultural values) systems is important to advance our understanding of complex interactions among those systems to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference and develop and implement better adaptation responses to climate change.

View the lecture in full below:

Image by Christian Ibarra.

Invited speaker Gabrielle Vance is a Scientific Project Officer at the MRI. In addition to her B.A. and M.S. in geology, she has more than a decade of experience editing scientific manuscripts for international researchers. She also teaches English and has earned CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and SVEB (Switzerland Association for Continuing Education) certifications.

Communicating science is simple, but not easy. In this lecture, Gabrielle illustrates four principles of effective scientific English with examples from recent MRI publications. These principles apply across disciplines and at multiple levels, from sentences to manuscripts. She shares concrete suggestions based on common challenges and recommends helpful resources. 

View the lecture in full below:

Download the presentation slides here.

More information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture can be found here. 

Image by Peter Kummli.

Conéctate A+ is a network of researchers and institutions interested in deepening the interdisciplinary, rigorous, and comparative analysis of top-priority problems linked to ecosystems, climate change, health, and sustainable development in the Tropical Andes – Central America region (Andes+). Conéctate A+ seeks to promote bilateral academic exchange between the Andes+ region and Switzerland. This webinar helps students and researchers in Switzerland discover study and research opportunities in Latin America. 

Inigo Irarrazaval (inigo.irarrazaval@ciep.cl), a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centro de Investigación en Ecosistemas de la Patagonia (CIEP), shares his experience of fieldwork challenges and research opportunities in Patagonia. Henriette Graf (henriette.graf@int.unibe.ch), an Exchange Coordinator at the University of Bern, presents UniBE’s partner universities in the Tropical Andes and Central America as well as the next steps for interested students. Antonio Crespo (acrespo@uazuay.edu.ec), the Chair of the Biology Department at the Universidad del Azuay, describes new MSc and PhD Programs in Natural Renewable Resources. He is the Coordinator of the MSc Program and a member of the Steering Committee of the PhD Program. 

View the webinar in full below:

Download the slides here.

Image by Eduardo Ruiz. 

Invited speaker James Thornton joined the Mountain Research Initiative in 2020 upon completion of his PhD in hydrogeology at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His doctoral research focused on the interdisciplinary, physics-based numerical modelling of hydrological processes in complex Alpine terrain, and involved a wide range of datasets and computational tools. Prior to that, James worked in the reinsurance sector, where he was responsible for leading the development of natural catastrophe models in order to quantify the risks associated with extreme events such as floods and tropical cyclones. He is currently responsible for the coordination and implementation of GEO Mountains, a GEO Initiative seeking to increase the availability and accessibility of a wide range of data pertaining to mountainous regions to benefit human societies and ecosystems globally.

In this presentation, James describes some of the initial steps that have recently been undertaken towards establishing a set of interdisciplinary climate-related variables (so-called Essential Mountain Climate Variables, EMCVs) that should be prioritised for systematic observation across mountain regions globally in order to provide more uniform reporting information and build more reliable predictive models. He also provides an outlook on possibilities to either strengthen the measurement of EMCVs, or else exploit existing EMCV data more efficiently. One approach, combining in situ and remotely sensed observations, is exemplified with respect to a distributed, energy-balanced based snow model. Finally, future steps towards the concept’s formalisation – to which the community is warmly invited to contribute – is proposed. 

View the lecture in full below:

Download the presentation slides here. To see the animations, please view the recording. 

Take the brief EMCVs suvey here. 

More information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture can be found here. 

Image by Pete. 

Download the flyer here.

View the webinar in full below:

Image by Angelo Villalobos. 

Conéctate A+ is a network of researchers and institutions interested in deepening the interdisciplinary, rigorous, and comparative analysis of top-priority problems linked to ecosystems, climate change, health, and sustainable development in the Tropical Andes – Central America region (Andes+). Conéctate A+ seeks to promote bilateral academic exchange between the Andes+ region and Switzerland. This webinar helps students in the Andes+ region discover study and scholarship opportunities in Switzerland.

Randy Muñoz, a PhD candidate at the University of Zürich, shares his experience applying for scholarships and the challenges and opportunities of living abroad, in particular, in Switzerland. Sedef Biçer, an International Scholars Advisor at the University of Zurich, shares Swiss scholarship opportunities for students from the Andes+ region. Henriette Graf, an Exchange Coordinator at the University of Bern, presents the key attraction points of UniBE, exchange opportunities and requirements, and next steps for interested students.

View the webinar in full below:

• The Student Experience: download slides here. Contact randy.munoz@geo.uzh.ch. 
• Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships: download slides here. Contact sedef.bicer@uzh.ch.
• Exchange Opportunities: download slides here. Contact henriette.graf@unibe.ch.

Image by GPhotography. 

Invited speaker Ignacio Palomo is Laureate of the Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) Research Program at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based at the University of Grenoble-Alps in France. His research focuses on human-nature interactions and nature-based adaptation to climate change in mountain social-ecological systems. He is part of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA).

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes towards sustainability, but empirical studies of large datasets that assess transformative change are scarce. During this lecture Palomo outlines how, through an MRI Synthesis Workshop, he and his fellow researchers developed a framework to evaluate how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) may contribute to transformative change. The framework enables the assessment of what may catalyse transformative change, how transformative change occurs, and what the main outcomes are. After applying this to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES) globally, the researchers found that NbS are as much ‘people-based’ as ‘nature-based.’ As Palomo outlines in his lecture, most NbS are based on four elements with transformation potential: nature’s values, knowledge types, community engagement, and nature management practices. He illustrates how the elements of the framework interact through a classification of NbS typologies, and stresses that the framework provides key components for assessing the effectiveness of NbS and allows the tracking of long-term transformative change processes.

The framework is outlined in the journal article ‘Assessing Nature-Based Solutions for Transformative Change,’ which was published in One Earth in May 2021.

View the lecture in full below:

Download the presentation slides here. 

More information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture can be found here. 

Cover image by loic Tijsseling. 

Invited speaker Maaike Bader is a professor in biogeography at the University of Marburg, Germany. Her work focuses on plant functioning in mountain ecosystems, at scales from individual seedlings and moss communities to global patterns. She particularly enjoys discussing the ecological processes controlling alpine treeline ecotone dynamics.

Alpine treeline ecotones mark the upper limit of tree cover in mountains all around the globe. This transition zone can take many different shapes, from discrete boundaries to wide zones of slowly diminishing tree size and cover. These different patterns reflect underlying processes, so that they can be used to understand how treelines are shaped and how they might respond to changes in driving factors, in particular climate. In this presentation, Maaike shares a recent framework for describing spatial patterns at alpine treelines and discusses what different patterns may tell us about treeline formation and dynamics.

View the lecture below:

Download the presentation slides here. Read Bader and others’ (2021) Ecography  article here. 

Follow Maaike’s example: apply for MRI Synthesis Workshop funding. 

Find more information about the next MRI Anniversary Lecture here. 

Cover image by cafepampas.