Dr. Moritz Laub

Research interests

Coming from an agricultural background, my main interest is the question how to have a sustainable agricultural food production, while maintaining an intact environment. My focus is soil carbon, since carbon stocks are a long-term indicator of soil fertility and are coupled to greenhouse gas emissions. With time I came to realize the importance of models to understand the agricultural system as a whole and to study how we could best manage our soils. My interest since then has been to connect field measurements and soil carbon models.

I am currently working in the Sustainable Agroecosystems group, where I am involved as a modeler in the LANDMARC and ISFM projects. These projects have the aim to develop suitable agricultural management practices which help to make soils a sink of greenhouse gas emissions and aim at maintaining or enhancing soil fertility. In a large consortium of different researchers, including many fields, we want to look at a portfolio of land-based mitigation techniques that help to combat climate change. Relevant stakeholders will be included to select the best potential solutions. Within these projects, I hope to make a contribution towards the transition of agriculture from being a “problematic sector” towards becoming part of the solutions to create a sustainable future.
Before coming to Zurich, I did my PhD at the University of Hohenheim (Germany), where I used long-term field trials to analyze the uncertainty that soil organic carbon models are subject to, including how the soil system could change under climate change. I also used infrared spectroscopy to classify carbon complexity as a basis for pool initialization of the soil carbon models.

Education

2017 – 2021 PhD in Agricultural Sciences. University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany.
2013 – 2016 M.Sc. in Agricultural Science in the Tropics and Subtropics, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany.
2009 – 2013 B.Sc. in Renewable Resources and Bioenergy, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany.

Selected publications

Laub, M., Ali, R.S., Demyan, M.S., Nkwain, Y.F., Poll, C., Högy, P., Poyda, A., Ingwersen, J., Blagodatsky, S., Kandeler, E., Cadisch, G., (2021). Modeling temperature sensitivity of soil organic matter decomposition: Splitting the pools. Soil Biol. Biochem. 153, 108108. doi: 10.1016/j.soilbio.2020.108108

Laub, M., Demyan, M.S., Nkwain, Y.F., Blagodatsky, S., Kätterer, T., Piepho, H., Cadisch, G., (2020). DRIFTS band areas as measured pool size proxy to reduce parameter uncertainty in soil organic matter models, Biogeosciences, 17(6), 1393–1413, doi:10.5194/bg-17-1393-2020, 2020.

Laub, M., Blagodatsky, S., Nkwain, Y.F., Cadisch, G., (2019). Soil sample drying temperature affects specific organic mid-DRIFTS peaks and quality indices. Geoderma 355, 113897. doi:10.1016/j.geoderma.2019.113897