Dr. Mirela Beloiu Schwenke

Research area

My research centers around the intersection of forest ecology, remote sensing, and climate change. In particular, I seek to understand the future of Earth’s forests in a changing climate. I investigate how human-caused climate change and drought affect forest ecosystems, including biodiversity, species distribution, tree resilience, recovery, and mortality. This, in turn, can help us better monitor and manage forests.

Projects

• SNSF - COST Action: Tree Species Identification 
• SNSF - Sinergia: Nowcasting, forecasting, upscaling - Novel avenues for forest vitality monitoring and anticipating forest dynamics (UPSCALE) 

Teaching

• 701-0034-08L Integrated Practical Wald- und Landschaft /Integrated practical course for forest ecosystems, Field excursion and exercises in Part I - Regeneration and Part III - Future forests - challenges and opportunities; 6th semester Bachelor's programme in Environmental Sciences, spring semester; 2022, 2023
• 701-0559-00L Wald und Landschaft (Forest and Landscape); 1 seminar on a scientific topic at choice; Bachelor's programme in Environmental Sciences, 2021, 2022

Students – BSc, MSc, and PhD

Doctoral students

Ongoing: Luca Ferrari, Zhongyu Xia

Supervised Master thesis

• Tomoki Loeillot, 2023, Climate-driven upward spread of forest fires in European mountain regions.
• Cécile Reichmuth, 2023, Dataset generation for tree species identification with Convolutional Neural Networks.
• Flavian Stocker, 2023, Detecting standing dead and low vitality trees in Swiss forests using aerial RGB and RGBI imagery and Deep Learning.
• Gioele Madonna, 2022, Impacts of severe droughts on tree resilience of Fagus sylvatica, Betula pendula, Populus nigra, and Pinus sylvestris in European forests.
• Lucca Heinzmann, 2022, Tree species identification in mixed forests using Deep Learning object detection. Prize for the best master’s thesis in Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich in 2022.

Publications

Google scholar

ORCID (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3592-8170)