Publications by Rodolphe Schlaepfer

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Soil structure formation in alluvial soils is a fundamental process in near-natural floodplains. A stable soil structure is essential for many ecosystem services and helps to prevent river bank erosion. Plants and earthworms are successful soil engineering ...

Species movement and occupancy of habitat patches are dependent on landscape permeability. Some land-use types (e.g., roads) may be barriers to animal movement. Analyses of the effect of landscape structure on patch occupancy usually use circular buffers a ...

In northern peatlands, reduction of Sphagnum dominance in favour of vascular vegetation is likely to influence biogeochemical processes. Such vegetation changes occur as the water table lowers and temperatures rise. To test which of these factors has a sig ...

Extensive efforts have been made in recent years to restore rivers with a view to increasing the ecological value of riparian areas and the surrounding landscape and to improving the protection provided against extreme flooding events. One of the important ...

Among the driving processes responsible for riparian forest dynamics the species-specific impact of flooding on the development of woody plants plays a key role-particularly for lowland rivers. Only a few of the forest succession models currently in use in ...

Among different dead wood types, large snags have a particular ecological relevance for biodiversity in forest ecosystems. For both research and management purposes, rapid and cost-effective inventories of large snags are required. Due to the great variability within stands and across the landscape, field recording of large snags is labour-intensive and expensive, if adequate sample sizes have to be ensured. We present a new method enabling efficient mapping and quantification of large snags by coupling col

The concept of ecosystem engineering has emerged decades ago and highlights the direct or indirect modulation of available resources by organisms through their biological activities. Ecosystem engineers create biogenic structures (aggregates, burrows) that may serve as habitats for other species than themselves. This chapter aims at overviewing the key role played by earthworms as ecosystem engineers through their bioturbation activities involving soil mixing as well as their influence on the decomposition

A large-scale field experiment on the drying behavior of Norway Spruce (Picea abies Karst.) and Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) in relation to the felling date was conducted over a period of 24 weeks in order to investigate the existence of variatio ...

Snow-farming is one of the adaptive strategies used to face the snow deficit in ski resorts. We studied the impact of a shifting snow-farming technique on a pasture slope in Adelboden, Switzerland. Specifically, we compared plots covered by a compressed sn ...

Significant land-use changes have occurred in Western European rural regions since the 1950s, leading to standardisation of the landscape, and to the decline of the richness in terms of habitat for fauna and flora. This paper reports on a study of the dynamics of a typical landscape for these regions (North-Western part of Switzerland) at five periods of time (the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s) and its relation with the decrease of the population of the brown hare (Lepus europaeus). The socio-economi

Participation has emerged as an appropriate approach for enhancing natural resources management. However, despite long experimentation with participation, there are still possibilities for improvement in designing a process of stakeholder involvement by addressing stakeholder heterogeneity and the complexity of decision-making processes. This paper provides a state-of-the-art overview of methods. It proposes a comprehensive framework to implement stakeholder participation in environmental projects, from sta

Rodolphe Schlaepfer

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Composition and superposition of alluvial deposits drive macro-biological soil engineering and organic matter dynamics in floodplains

Landscape effects on anuran pond occupancy in an agricultural countryside: barrier-based buffers predict distributions better than circular buffers

Ericoid shrub encroachment shifts aboveground-belowground linkages in three peatlands across Europe and Western Siberia

Flooding tolerance of Central European tree and shrub species

Modelling the impact of flooding stress on the growth performance of woody species using fuzzy logic

Spruce snag quantification by coupling colour infrared aerial photos and a GIS

Earthworms as ecosystem engineers : a review

Looking for differences in wood properties as a function of the felling date: lunar phase-correlated variations in the drying behavior of Norway Spruce (Picea abies Karst.) and Sweet Chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.)

Impacts of snow-farming on alpine soil and vegetation: A case study from the Swiss Alps

Hare abundance as an indicator for urbanisation and intensification of agriculture in Western Europe

A framework to implement Stakeholder participation in environmental projects

Recent Climate Change: Rethinking Drought in the Context of Forest Fire Research in Ticino, South of Switzerland