SCIENTIST SAYS / NGC MONTHLY SERIES / SEPTEMBER 2025

Prof. Nina Buchmann

Mon 8 September 2025,  NGC Communication Team

Professor Nina Buchmann. Photo:  NGC Communication Team 

SCIENTIST SAYS – OUR MONTHLY INTERVIEW SERIES Meet Nina Buchmann, Professor of Grassland Sciences in the Institute of Agricultural Sciences at ETH Zurich. At NextGenCarbon, Nina will oversee the agricultural aspects of the project. When it comes to carbon sinks, forests are not the only area of interest; grasslands and croplands also play a significant role in global carbon storage.  We caught up with the busy professor for a short interview on a beautiful sunny day in Paris in June.

Nina, what are you most excited about in this project?

- What I’m most excited about in NextGenCarbon is the opportunity to work with others on the carbon balance of European ecosystems. Also pushing new technologies and updating the global carbon budget are great goals. In our case, we are interested in process understanding. And so, working across scales, which is often not possible in other national projects, is a great asset. Another aspect is that we’re testing new approaches in order to better understand ecosystems, in our case, grasslands and croplands.

What is your method to understand ecosystems better?

- We use stable isotopes to better understand plant ecophysiology and investigate the spatial heterogeneity within the footprint of eddy-covariance towers. At those towers, we measure the greenhouse gas exchange, for example of CO2, CH4, N2O and H2O, between the ecosystem and the atmosphere.

I think our results from agroecosystems are particularly interesting to better understand the reasons of model uncertainty when comparing observations to model results.

Who do you think the research would be interesting to?

- Within the project, our results will be useful for modelers at various scales, at the ecosystem level in terms of fluxes, at varying spatial scales in terms of spatial heterogeneity of vegetation performance, but overall, in terms of gaining spatial information about the vegetation response to management or extreme events. Thus, on the one hand, our results will be useful for validation, on the other hand also to improve model parameterization. And I think our results from agroecosystems are particularly interesting to better understand the reasons of model uncertainty when comparing observations to model results.

That is indeed an interesting topic. We look forward to hearing more about the results later! Could you share a fun fact about yourself here at the end?

- I love to travel and our living room has meters of book shelves for travel literature- including about Paris.