Tiziana Li Koch and Carole Niffenegger win the Phenology Competition 2025/6.

In her doctorate thesis at WSL, Tiziana Li Koch investigated how we can use satellites for monitoring tree species phenology. The study showed that satellite remote sensing is best suited as a complementary monitoring system, extending phenology observations across space and time. A preprocessed sentinel-2 series dataset for Switzerland was used to calculate phenology metrics.

As part of her doctorate thesis at ETH Zürich and Schweizerische Vogelwarte, Carole Niffenegger demonstrated the potential sensitivity of white-winged snowfinches to climate changes. Higher pre-breeding temperatures and reduces April precipitation were associated with an earlier start of breeding. The analyses are based on 16-years of citizen science data from ornithon.ch