ECOSYSTEMS LAB ASSOCIATES

Sandra Díaz is an ecologist interested in plant functional traits and syndromes, their effects on ecosystem properties, their contributions to human quality of life, and their interactions with global change drivers. She constructed the first global quantitative picture of essential functional diversity of vascular plants –the global spectrum of plant form and function. She has advanced theory and practical implementation of the concept of functional diversity and its effects on ecosystem properties and benefits to people. She combines her ecology studies with interdisciplinary work on how different societies value and reconfigure nature, having spearheaded transformative conceptual frameworks favouring pluralistic collaborations in environmental knowledge and action, including the notion of nature’s contributions to people. She founded Núcleo DiverSus on Diversity and Sustainability, co-founded the Global Communal Plant Trait Initiative TRY, and co-chaired the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. She is a Foreign Fellow of the British Royal Society, among other scientific academies, and has received several international scientific awards, including the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2021), and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Medal (2022). Her permanent home is in Córdoba, Argentina, where she is a Professor at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and a Senior Principal Investigator of CONICET.

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, writer, and speaker with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of Oxford University and the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works closely with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and the Fungi Foundation. His book, Entangled Life, is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, won the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize, and was nominated for a number of other prizes, including the British Book Awards and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It has been translated into thirty-two languages. Merlin is the presenter of Fungi: Web of Life, a giant screen documentary narrated by Björk. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. He is a musician and performs on the piano and accordion.

Erle Ellis is Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where he directs the Anthroecology Laboratory. His research investigates the ecology of human landscapes at local to global scales to inform sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. His recent work examines long-term changes in Earth’s ecology produced by human societies through the concept of anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes, a term he introduced in 2008. He has developed online tools for global synthesis of local knowledge (GLOBE) and inexpensive tools for mapping landscapes in 3D (Ecosynth). He is a Global Highly Cited Researcher, a UMBC Presidential Research Professor, a lead author on the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, a Fellow of the Global Land Programme, a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute and a former member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. He teaches environmental science and landscape ecology at UMBC and has taught ecology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. His first book, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.

Cécile is Science Lead of the Oxford Biodiversity Network and Technical Director of the Nature Based Solutions Initiative. Cécile is passionate about translating science into art, and using art to facilitate scientific discussions. She combines years of experience in climate change policy analysis with a background in tropical ecology and thorough understanding of forest ecosystem functioning, providing a unique multidisciplinary approach to my work. As a consultant for the UN FAO REDD+ team, she worked on policy analysis and gained clear insights into the UNFCCC principles. As a researcher in the University of Oxford, She developed skills in data gathering and analysis through intensive fieldwork in Andean and Amazonian tropical forests, and managed the Global Ecosystems Monitoring network dataset.

Prof. Philip Antwi-Agyei is a Professor of Climate Change and Sustainability Science, and the Director of the Office of Grants and Research, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Philip is a former Commonwealth Scholar, who obtained his PhD from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom in July, 2013. He also holds MSc degree from the University of Hull, United Kingdom and a BSc degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Philip is an interdisciplinary climate change scientist, whose research involves developing innovative multi-scale approaches for assessing vulnerability to climate change (especially in the form of drought sensitivity) for dryland African farming systems. Specifically, his research uses spatial databases, ecological studies and field-based participatory approaches within the broader understanding of how climate change affects food production and rural livelihoods from a developing country perspective. Another strand of his research explores how smallholder farmers in “vulnerability hotspots" in dryland farming systems are adapting to climate change and variability.

Jeppe is a physical geographer currently interested in how animals regulate ecosystem biogeochemistry and climate change feedbacks. In times of climate change, much research is on biological responses to abiotic drivers, however, Jeppe is particularly fascinated about how animals themselves modulate their physical and chemical (abiotic) environment as ecosystem engineers. Most of his research has been centered around soils in the interface with landscape ecology, geoarcheology, and geochronology. Jeppe’s scientific contributions include the use of burial mounds in Scandinavia as paleoarchives for prehistoric soil C content, quantification of termite biotubation in African savannahs and forests using sediment dating techniques, and the impact of insect herbivores on biogeochemical cycling in the Subarctic. During his fellowhip in Oxford, Jeppe will assess how large herbivore introduction (megafauna rewilding) affects soil C dynamics, with his primary field site being the Pleistocene Park in Siberia (project: HERBIVARC). He has previously worked at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Wageningen University (Netherlands), and Lund University (Sweden).

David is a postdoc researcher working on the way climate and soil variability influence tropical tree growth and mortality rates at multiple spatial scales.  During his PhD (Université libre de Bruxelles), he focused on the spatial analyses of ecological data, and contributed to the optimization of the statistical performances of multiscale spatial eigenvector-based analyses and variation partitioning. The overall aim of this research was to address the processes of tree community assembly and species coexistence in spatially-explicit ways. David also studied the impact of fine-scale soil heterogeneity on tree community assembly in African dry woodlands (Miombo). His interest in forests’ response to changes in their environment brought him to the Ecosystems Lab, to investigate how tree demographic performances, or vital rates (i.e. growth, survival, and recruitment) are influenced by the interplay of species functional traits, climate, topography, and soil, in the tropical rainforests of Australia. This work is part of the ‘Tropical Forests in the Changing Earth System’ project.

Göran is a plant ecophysiologist with interests in the functioning of boreal and tropical forest ecosystems.  His research is focused on field manipulative experiments to understand how global change and air pollutants affects forest ecosystems. Another topic is carbon and nutrients dynamics of boreal and tropical montane forest, specifically in northern Scandinavian and Central Africa (Rwanda). Since 2003, he is strongly engaged in capacity building in Rwanda along with establishment of different tropical forest research projects, together with different partners. Göran’s permanent position is a senior lecturer at University of Gothenburg (UGOT). He is currently a PI in the Rwanda TREE project - a collaboration between UGOT, University of Rwanda and Rwanda Forest Authority to study the effects of changing climate on tropical montane forest trees (www. rwandatree.com) and a PI in the research platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate (BECC) – a strategic research area between UGOT and Lund University. He has also been founding and leading the undergraduate Environmental education programs at UGOT for many years.

Walter a tropical plant ecologist interested in understanding forest ecosystems functioning, in particular research topics of biodiversity, above-belowground functional traits, carbon cycle, water cycle, fungi, and ecological restoration along environmental gradients in tropical regions. His PhD was addressed to understand root dynamics and morphological traits in tropical montane and lowland forest ecosystems, where root traits are related to soil and environmental factors. He was involved and collaborating with Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG), Global Ecosystem monitoring network (GEM), Amazon Forest Network Inventory (RAINFOR), The Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) and Past, Present and Future of the Peatlands of the Central Congo Basin project (CongoPeat) networks since 2003, set upping permanent forest plots and experiments to measure carbon cycle in tropical regions. His current interest is to understand macrofungi ecology and conservation, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi species (AMF) distribution and association to tree species across environmental gradients in tropical regions, and also to explore new research topics.