The Sustainable Agroecosystems Group was established in March 2013 at ETH-Zurich. We are part of the Institute of Agricultural Sciences in the Department of Environmental Systems Science (D-USYS).
Our mission is to understand, evaluate, and develop sustainable agroecosystems around the world through an integration of experimental and modeling approaches across scales and disciplines.
The Sustainable Agroecosystems Group (SAE) is working across scales and disciplines in the following fields:
- Soil Biota & Nutrient Cycling
- N Cycling and Isotopes
- Biogeochemical Modeling
- Diverse Agroecosystems
- Food Systems
Head of the Group: Johan Six
In order to understand sustainable agriculture and implement it, we need to elucidate the feedbacks between ecosystem management options (e.g., tillage, cover cropping, green manuring, sustainable farming, and grazing), global change (e.g., elevated CO2 and climate change), and biogeochemical cycling. Hence, we need to unravel the complex interactions between plants (e.g., diversity, nutrient uptake, and root growth), soil (e.g, structure, texture and mineralogy), soil biota (e.g. fungi, bacteria, and earthworms), and the carbon and nitrogen cycles in agroecosystems across spatial and temporal scales. Furthermore, since agriculture is a human enterprise, not only biophysical aspects, but also social and economic dimensions of sustainable agriculture need to be elucidated. One approach to do so is bio-economic modeling through which the sustainability of agricutural practices is holistically assessed.