Jari Liski, Research Professor and Chief Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, has developed soil and vegetation sampling, measurement, and modeling methods for 30 years. Jari Liski is the founder of Yasso soil carbon model and his methods are used internationally, for example, in several European countries’ national greenhouse gas inventory systems, the Max Planck Earth System Model, and many land-use sector calculation systems. Before his career at FMI he worked at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) and at the European Forest Institute.
Jari gives a keynote talk in Session 1 on Tuesday 23.11 at 13:00-15:15, titled "Measurement, reporting and verification system for climate impacts of agriculture"
Martin Brandt received his PhD from the University of Bayreuth, Germany in 2014. He works as Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen since 2015 and is also associated with NASA. His major fields are remote sensing and physical Geography and his work concentrates on the monitoring of vegetation dynamics, with a special focus on West Africa and Southern China. Martin Brandt’s research is breaking new ground, with 14 manuscripts published in Nature/Science journals since 2018 (5 as first author). His recent work, published In Nature, was the first applying deep learning on hundreds of thousands of sub-metre satellite images to map billions of individual tree crowns in desert areas that were often assumed as free of any trees. In 2020, he received an ERC starting grant to study trees outside forests at global scale.
Martin gives a keynote talk in Session 2 on Tuesday 23.11 at 15:45-17:15, titled "Mapping individual tree crowns at country and continental scale with deep learning"
Dr. Sophia Walther obtained her PhD in meteorology from the Free University Berlin in 2018 and is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Global Diagnostic Modeling group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena/ Germany. There she is part of the core team of the international 'Fluxcom' project, co-designing and developing a data-driven approach to simulate carbon, water and energy exchange between the land surface and the atmosphere. Her work focuses on the processing of global satellite data, the development and implementation of methods for quality checks, aggregation and gap-filling. In 2020 she was granted a personal ESA Living Planet Fellowship for her own subproject within Fluxcom. Here she aims at dedicated methods and approaches to improve the representation of water stress effects within Fluxcom, with special attention to both extreme events and seasonal droughts. During her PhD at the Geophysical Research Centre Potsdam she gained ample experience in using optical and fluorescence-based Earth observation data for the assessment of temporal patterns in terrestrial productivity, both globally and with a focus on boreal and arctic ecosystems. She spent in total 6 months of her PhD researching at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy in 2016/17. Currently she is also actively involved in third party projects H2020 VERIFY and ESA CCI LST.
Sophia gives a keynote talk in Session 3 on Wednesday 24.11 at 10-12, titled "Transitioning to a new generation of data-driven biogenic flux modelling - lessons learned and the way forward".
Dr. Werner Kutsch is Director General of the Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) since March 2014. He is biologist, plant ecologist and ecosystem scientist by education and has worked on ecosystem carbon cycling and carbon-climate feedbacks for 25 years in Europe and Africa. The focus of his work has been for a long time in the impact of land use change on ecosystem properties and in integrating complex landscapes. He has worked at the Ecosystem Research Centre of University of Kiel, Germany, at CSIR in Pretoria, South Africa, at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany and at Thünen, the Federal Research Institute for Rural Areas, Forestry and Fisheries in Braunschweig, Germany. Werner Kutsch is experienced in data acquisition, post-processing, data analysis and modelling of ecosystem carbon budgets.
ICOS is an ESFRI Landmark Research Infrastructure and a legal entity (ERIC) since November 2015. As DG, Werner Kutsch is the legal representative and overall coordinator of the Research Infrastructure and has managed the final internal integration of ICOS. This work comprised internal organisation of the operations of the distributed observational networks and central facilities, optimizing the internal data flow between the different observational programs of ICOS, developing the data platform of ICOS (‘Carbon Portal’) which also serves as an interface to COPERNICUS and GEOSS, and deepening the cooperation with other RIs. ICOS is now fully operational and provides in situ data on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and on fluxes of ocean and land surfaces.
Dr Kutsch is now leading the further development ICOS which includes services based on ICOS data for scientists and for societies. ICOS is foreseen as an integral part of the European greenhouse gas monitoring and verification support (MVS) system. Beyond that, ICOS aims to be part of global data integration initiatives that support the usage of in-situ observations for improving climate action.
Thomas Frölicher is currently a SNSF Assistant Professor at the Climate and Environmental Physics Division of the University of Bern and the head of the ocean modelling group. He is interested in marine ecosystem-carbon-climate interactions with focus on ocean extreme events and their impacts on climate and on marine organisms and ecosystem services. He studied environmental sciences at ETH Zürich and graduated in Physics at the University of Bern. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and as a senior researcher at ETH Zürich. He is the recipient of the 2019 Theodor Kocher Prize of the University of Bern. Thomas is strongly involved in the H2020 projects COMFORT (ocean extremes and tipping points), 4C (global carbon cycle), AtlantECO (Atlantic ecosystems) and PROVIDE (overshoot scenarios). He was the lead author of chapter six on Extremes, Abrupt Changes and Managing Risks of the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, including the summary for policy makers, and contributed to the fifth and sixth assessment report of working group I and II of the IPCC and to the second World Ocean Assessment.
Thomas gives a keynote talk in Session 4 on Wednesday 24.11 at 14-16, titled "From marine heatwaves to ocean biogeochemical extremes and compound events"
Dr Rona Thompson completed her PhD in atmospheric chemistry from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 2005. Following this, she held post-doctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany and at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement in France. Since 2011, Dr Thompson holds a senior scientist position at the Norwegian Institute of Air Research in Norway. Her research is focused on the use of atmospheric transport models and data assimilation to improve understanding of the processes determining the atmospheric composition of greenhouse gases and other species. Dr Thompson is active in European and Norwegian research projects and was a contributing author to the IPCC 5th and 6th Assessment Reports.
Rona gives a keynote talk in Session 5 on Thursday 25.11 at 10-12, titled "Recent trends in CH4 and N2O and their role as climate forcers"