Peter Edwards

Peter J. Edwards has been Full Professor of Plant Ecology at the ETH Zurich and director of the Geobotanical Institute since September 1993. In this institute he directs the research group for community and ecosystem ecology.

Prof. Edwards was born on July 29, 1948 in Durban, South Africa, and is a British citizen. He studied botany at the University of Cambridge in England, writing his doctoral dissertation on nutrientcycling in a tropical mountain rain forest in New Guinea. In 1973 he was appointed lecturer in ecology at the University of Southampton. During his stay at Southampton he co-founded and directed an interdisciplinary environmental research institute, the GeoData Institute.

His research concentrates on ecosystems and large scale ecological processes which cover large areas. Many of his projects focus on the application of ecological research to environmental concerns. He has written over one hundred articles and three books for the most part dealing with such topics as the nutrient cycling in ecosystems, the interaction between plants and herbivores, plant ecology in river ecosystems, and the application of GIS in ecology. At the present time his research themes are the biodiversity in agroecosystems, the effects of grazing cattle and horses on the vegetation and the relationship between the species composition and ecosystems funtion in grasslands.