Photo: Corriere del Ticino/Gabriele Putzu, 2021. Fire above the village of Arosio, Canton Ticino.

Photo: Roman Zweifel, Swiss Federal Institute of Research WSL. Point dendrometers mounted on tree stems continuously measure stem radii with a resolution of micrometers. The readings contain information about stem growth and tree water relations.

Photo by Fabian Schneider, Remote Sensing Laboratories, University of Zürich. A terrestrial laser scanner in the beech forest at the Lägern forest site. This instrument is used to capture the gray scale points in the other figure. It records several hundred thousand laser echoes (3d coordinates of reflecting objects) per second and is revolutionising the way we assess and quantify forest structure in the context of ecosystem research.

Photo by Fabian Schneider, Remote Sensing Laboratories, University of Zürich. Combination of terrestrial laser scanning (grey-scale) and drone-based laser scanning (cyan) point clouds acquired on the same day at Lägern Forest, Switzerland. The combined point cloud conveys the branching structure of the beech trees in leaf-off condition in great detail which is of great relevance to understand forest functioning.

Photo: Simon Speich, WSL. Using a high-precision GPS, the exact coordinates of each test area are recorded. In this way they can be located in the aerial photographs, thus enabling combined data processing.

Drone photo by Guido Wiesenberg (Department of Geography, UZH). Eugenie Paul-Limoges and Bastian Buman (rsws.ch, Department of Geography, UZH) maintaining the FloX spectrometer on the Lägeren flux tower. These measurements help to understand the vegetation response to environmental changes.

Photo: Simon Speich, Martigny-Combe (VS). The care of the protective forest creates light for regeneration. High stumps and trunks that have been left at an angle stabilise the snowpack.

Photo: Nancy Bolze/WSL. A researcher observes the various stages of leaf budding in climatic chambers with different temperatures.

Photo: Andreas Rigling, WSL. Drying beech leaves in Schaffhausen in July 2018.

Photo Simon Speich, WSL. A researcher enters data into her laptop and transmits it directly to the WSL database via her mobile phone.

Courtesy of WLS.