Thesis Projects
scClim provides opportunities for Master and Bachelor students to write their thesis within the scope of the scClim project. Have a look at our open topics and contact us to apply and discuss your thesis further.
Master’s Thesis: Earlier hail, earlier harvest – who wins? Investigating the interplay between shifts in hail frequency and wheat phenology in Switzerland in the last 50 years
Hail is a major damage driver for crops in Switzerland. With the newly developed Swiss hail time series, we reconstructed past hail days until 1959. The time series showed an increase in haildays in the beginning of the hail season and an earlier peak in the last decades. At the same time, wheat harvest occurs about 2 weeks earlier today than in the 1970s, leading to a shorter time period when wheat is potentially exposed to hail. How do these two shifts interact and influence hail risk to Swiss wheat? The student will use gridded data on wheat heading and harvest dates in combination with a reconstructed time series of past hail occurrence. The thesis is done in cooperation with Agroscope and part of the interdisciplinary scClim project (scClim).
The goal is to analyze how the change in seasonality of Swiss hailday occurrence in the last ~ 50 years compares to changes in heading and harvest date of wheat cultures in Switzerland.
- How has the number of hail days during the vegetative period of wheat changed over the past 50 years?
- How has the number of hail days during the flowering period of wheat (a particularly vulnerable phase) changed?
- Are there compensating effects?
Other tasks depend on the first results, but could include applying a similar approach to future climate scenarios.
Contact: Prof. Dr. Olivia Romppainen-Martius (), Lena Wilhelm (), Raphael Portmann ()
Supervisors: Olivia Romppainen-Martius (University of Bern), Lena Wilhelm (University of Bern) and Raphael Portman (Agroscope)