Interdisciplinary Master's thesis topics

The Museum Cerny in Bern – a unique worldwide collection of arctic art (https://mcca.ch/) – contains a legacy of photographs from Greenland, which have not yet been scientifically analysed, especially for glacier research and reconstruction. The photos were taken by Urs Stoller, who worked as a helicopter pilot in Greenland for decades, from 1974 to 2010 in the entire coastal area of Greenland. This also includes 16 GEUS summer expeditions, which enabled him to document many less accessible areas.

The entire photo collection comprises around 3000 images, including around 100 glacier photos, some of which can be viewed at: https://db.museumcerny.ch/index.php?form-inuit-search=stoller&form-inuit-group=objects

More information about the Master Thesis Topic (PDF, 3 MB)

Supervision from the GIUZ: Dr Samuel Nussbaumer & Dr Jacqueline Bannwart

Two interdisciplinary MSc projects are available as part of a PhD project at the Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETZ Zurich.

Project 1: Relationship between tick hazard (where ticks are the most abundant) and tick exposure (where people hang out the most)

Project 2: What is the role of birds as tick hosts?

More ...

Supervision from the GIUZ: to be determined.

Understanding coupled social-ecological systems requires an in-depth analysis of both the social and the ecological systems, and their interactions and feedbacks. Despite this recognized need, in practice this means that to answer questions related to social-ecological feedbacks requires double the amount of information, data and makes it harder for individual students to conduct it to a satisfactory level. Here we propose a coupled approach to a Masters' thesis. More... (PDF, 59 KB)

Maria J. Santos, Norman Backhaus
Earth System Science; Space, Nature & Society

Landscapes containing water bodies are often considered as especially attractive. This master thesis will in a first step analyse literature discussing this fact. Based on this knowledge examples of different kinds of landscapes with and without water bodies shall be identified and and in a third step tested with test persons in the Eye Moving Lab. The detailed setup of this research will be established with the Master student at the beginning of the thesis.

Norman Backhaus, Ilja van Meerveld
Space, Nature & Society, Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis, Hydrology and Climate

Ross Purves, Norman Backhaus
Geocomputation, Space, Nature & Society

Andreas Vieli, Ross Purves
Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics, Geocomputation

Andreas Vieli, Ilja van Meerveld
Glaciology and Geomorphodynamics, Hydrology and Climate