Horizon Grant for two Environmental Engineers
The «WaldLab Forest Experimental Site» on Hönggerberg in Zurich is a key site in the international EU Horizon project CryoSCOPE, which started in February 2025. CryoSCOPE investigates the interplay between atmospheric, cryospheric, and hydrologic systems across various landscapes, including the Swiss Alps, Finnish Lapland, Svalbard, and the Himalayas. A key focus is on quantifying hydrologic partitioning, so how precipitation is distributed into streamflow, groundwater, and evapotranspiration.
The project involves an international consortium consisting of 19 research institutions from Finland, Iceland, Norway, Belgium, Austria, Germany, India, and Switzerland. The total funding amount is 9.8 million euros, of which 1.8 million euros will go to the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering (D-BAUG) at ETH Zurich. At D-BAUG, the project is led by Marius Floriancic and Harsh Beria, the funding was provided by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).
Dr. Marius Floriancic is a Senior Research Assistant in the Chair of Hydrology at the Institute of Environmental Engineering. His research integrates small-scale field investigations and large-scale data evaluation to understand hydrological processes of water movement through different compartments of the water cycle (subsurface - surface - vegetation - atmosphere). He leads the «WaldLab Forest Experimental Site» on Zürich Hönggerberg. More Information
Dr. Harsh Beria is a Research Scientist currently working at SLF Davos and MeteoSwiss who will join the Chair of Hydrology at the Institute of Environmental Engineering for this project. The central theme of his research is to understand how water flows within natural landscapes, tracing it from the time it enters the ecosystem through rainfall or snowfall to the time it finally emerges into the nearby stream following a data-centric approach to problem solving, working with a wide range of dataset ranging from tracers like stable water isotopes, eddy-covariance carbon and water flux measurements, satellite remote sensing, tree rings and forest inventory, etc. external page More information