The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) has awarded a grant of nearly 1 Million Swiss Francs to the CIVES project: Many European cities have a heritage dating back to the Iron Age or Roman times. CIVES explores how early urbanization dynamics in Europe were linked to factors of land use (e.g. crop yields), the environment (e.g. climate), and/or ecology (e.g. biodiversity).
The interdisciplinary project is led by Willy Tinner, head of the Paleoecology group. It pools the knowledge and skills of several other OCCR research groups, namely Geocomputation and Earth Observation (Benjamin Stocker), Climatology (Stefan Wunderle), Geology (Hendrik Vogel), and Environmental History and Historical Climatology (Christian Rohr). Numerous research partners from Switzerland and Europe participate in CIVES, among them the Archaeological Service of Canton Bern, ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, the Sapienza University of Rome, the Water Research Institute IRSA Verbania, the University of Thessaly, and the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences Potsdam.
