WSL soil researcher appointed professor at ETH

Katrin Meusburger from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) wants to understand and predict how soils store water and the quality of water they release to plants and watercourses. ‘It is important to me that soil functions are preserved even in the face of global change and that we identify risks such as soil drought and degradation at an early stage,’ she says.

In Switzerland, Meusburger primarily researches water availability in forests. She has set up the WSL's SwissSpot network for soil moisture measurements. She also uses stable isotopes of water, i.e. water molecules with hydrogen and oxygen atoms of different weights, to track where trees get their water from and how much water is stored in forest soils. At present, this is still a lot, but future scenarios show that water availability will clearly decline with climate change. In addition to new insights, her research also provides a basis for decision-making in forest management.

Protecting soils

In another part of her work, Meusburger uses radioactive substances such as caesium-137 and plutonium, which originate from nuclear tests and accidents and have been deposited in the soil. These serve as markers to understand how quickly and where soil is being displaced. Together with her colleagues, she develops large-scale maps and models to better quantify soil erosion. For Europe, these markers have been used to demonstrate that around 10 per cent of topsoil on arable land has been lost since the 1960s.

Meusburger studied hydrology at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) and completed her doctorate at the University of Basel in the Environmental Geosciences group. Since July 2025, she has headed the Soil Functions and Dynamics Group at WSL. She has co-authored around 110 scientific publications (ISI) and this year appears for the first time on Clarivate's list of ‘highly cited researchers’, which identifies the most influential researchers in their field.