Dr. Daniel Scherrer

My research interests encompass spatial ecology, plant ecophysiology and climatology. Earlier research in the field of ecophysiology includes plant-water-relations in forest trees under climate warming and work in the Swiss Canopy Crane project (http://plantecology.unibas.ch/scc/index.shtml). These projects allowed me to familiarise with a large number techniques including dendrometer, sap-flow, thermal imagery, dendrochronology, photosynthesis and soil respiration measurements. During my PhD I worked in arctic and alpine ecosystems investigating the influence of small scale topography on micro-climate and plant species distribution. Based on this small scale data we tried to assess the impact of climate warming on topographic rich alpine environments and to overcome the limitations of large scale models. During the earliest stage of my scientific career I worked on (meta-) population models of high alpine plants in Switzerland.
My present studies are focused both on practical and theoretical aspects of species distribution modelling of forest ecosystems. For theoretical questions I use the controlled conditions of artificial/virtual species distribution data to test and investigate the influence of input parameters on the projected species distribution. On the practical side I try to find and establish new environmental factors such as soil moisture and ecological indicator values to improve high resolution species distribution models for forest ecosystems.