Speakers 

Jérôme Chave is a CNRS research director, director of the Evolution and Biological Diversity unit in Toulouse, and head of the French laboratoire d'excellence Centre d'Etude de la Biodiversité Amazonienne (French Guiana). As an adviser to the European Space Agency, he has been involved since 2009 in the BIOMASS Earth Explorer satellite, which will be launched in 2023. He is the co-lead of the global GEO-TREES initiative, which aims to provide ground-based validation for forest carbon remote sensing projects. 

Emma Bush -  Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh, UK.  My research focusses on plants, their role in human society and the climate and biodiversity crises. I publish scientific papers in international journals and provide policy-relevant briefings to governments. My core scientific expertise lies in plant life cycle science (phenology), tropical forest ecosystems, climate impacts on plants and the role of plants in urban resilience and climate adaptation.  In 2017 I founded the African Phenology Network and am keen to hear from African scientists and those interested in African phenology to lead on this initiative. 

Susan Cook-Patton is a Senior Forest Restoration Scientist on the Natural Climate Solutions Science Team at The Nature Conservancy. She works to quantify the climate mitigation potential of reforestation and other natural climate solutions and infuse the best-available science into policy decisions. To do this, she collaborates with scientists across the globe, and from academic, government, and other non-governmental organizations. Joining online. 

 

Aida Cuni-Sanchez is Associate Professor at the Norwegian Uni of Life Sciences. Aida's research interests, at the interphase between natural and social sciences, have focused on tropical forest dynamics & carbon stocks, forest ecosystem services, forest conservation and local communities’ adaptation to climate change.  Joining online.

Laura Duncanson - Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Geographical Sciences Department.  I am a remote sensing scientist interested in mapping and understanding forest 3D structure. Earth's forests are incredibly diverse, both in species, function and structure, and and I am interested in how forests occupy space, and how that links to carbon stocks and cycles. My research questions range from applied questions of algorithm development for forest biomass mapping, and ecology questions about the structural diversity of forests at a global scale. Joining online.

 

Adriane Esquivel Muelbert is a lecturer in Global Forest Ecology at the University of Birmingham.  She investigates how forests respond to different global change forces and what the implications of these responses are on biodiversity and global biogeochemical cycles. Her work demonstrates the importance of drought tolerance in shaping diversity and composition across Neotropical tree communities and provides evidence that Amazonian forests are changing as a result of the increase in water stress and atmospheric CO₂ . More recently, she has focused on tree mortality and how tree death varies across large geographical scales.

Filipe França Lecturer at the University of Bristol. Filipe investigates how tropical forest biodiversity and ecosystem functioning is affected by human activities and climatic stressors. Filipe co-coordinates a long-term ecological monitoring program in the Brazilian Amazon (PELD-RAS) and co-founded the Synergize Network, which aims to synthesize biodiversity responses to multiple stressors in Amazonian ecosystems. 

Vincent Gauci is a Birmingham Professorial Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Vincent investigates how the biosphere interacts with the atmosphere and he explores questions relating to how these interactions respond to various drivers of global change.

David Lapola - I am a research scientist at the Center for Meteorological and Climatic Research Applied to Agriculture at the University of Campinas – UNICAMP, where my research team and I devote our time to understand the consequences of global climatic change on the Amazon forest and its cascading impacts on the region’s people and a variety of socioeconomic processes. I have a bachelor in Ecology (2005) from the State University of São Paulo – UNESP, a master’s degree in Meteorology (2007) from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research – INPE, and a PhD in Earth System Modelling (2010) from the Max Planck Institute/University of Kassel in Germany, which, altogether provide me a well-desired interdisciplinary background. Joining online.

Belinda Medlyn - Distinguished Professor, Theme Lead for Ecosystem Function and Integration at the University of Western Sydney. Belinda's research focuses on how plants, especially forests, respond to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change. Belinda works at the interface between experiments and models. Joining online.

 

Richard Norby - Richard J. Norby is an ecosystem ecologist interested in ecosystem responses to atmospheric and climatic change, effects of CO₂ enrichment on tree growth and forest metabolism, and the synthesis of experimental results to inform models. He is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee (USA), having retired in 2020 after 38 years at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Rich has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Birmingham, he is an editor of New Phytologist, and he serves on the Scientific Steering Committee of AmazonFACE.

Oliver Phillips Oliver Phillips is Professor of Tropical Ecology at the University of Leeds. Oliver’s research goal is to understand the dynamics of Earth’s tropical forests, how these respond to our changing climate, and how they feedback on our planet. The challenge demands global teamwork and a multidisciplinary approach. With colleagues, he leads long-term monitoring of Amazon forest trees and species. This work spans 400 sites (the RAINFOR project), discovered the Amazon carbon sink, and has inspired similar approaches elsewhere in Africa and Asia. Oliver hopes to empower all those measuring trees on-the-ground. By connecting forest workers worldwide via ForestPlots.net it is possible to meet their needs to manage and analyse forest information, while creating together the unified, large-scale forest knowledge that the world needs.