Partners

Show all members

Sarah Adams

Sarah Adams is the co-lead of WP7, communication, dissemination and exploitation. She is the communications manager for the Mediterranean and Genetic Resources Facilities of the European Forest Institute, based in Barcelona, Spain. She is responsible for the Facility network and project communications and has led various FP7 and H2020 project work packages. Her skills include strategic planning, developing tailored dissemination products, writing and editing, workshop facilitation, layout and web design processes, and training in communications skills.

Peter Alexander

Peter Alexander is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the social, economic and environmental interactions within the food and land use systems, applying data and computationally intensive techniques, such as agent-based modelling. Alexander was a lead author for the 2022 IPCC Working Group II report. Working with his group, he considers the interactions between climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as how globalisation creates teleconnections between actions in one location having consequences in others. The role of international trade in reducing or exacerbating vulnerabilities to shocks, including geopolitical shocks, is of particular interest. He leads the development of the Land System Modular Model (LandSyMM), which has been used to quantify the impacts of the changes on ecosystem service indicators, and explore the impact of future changes in diet on habitat availability in biodiversity hotspots, as well as the reverse—looking at the food security implications of different land conservation scenarios.

Bart Arendarczyk

Bart Arendarczyk is a PhD student at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. He is involved in the development of the Land System Modular Model (LandSyMM), focusing on modelling global scenarios for land-based mitigation of climate change. His research includes the implementation of a spatially detailed forestry sector within LandSyMM using realistic, biophysically derived forest growth responses. The aim is to produce global assessments of reforestation potential, among other mitigation options, while considering the costs, benefits, and trade-offs of mitigation with food production and other land-use factors.

Almut Arneth

Almut Arneth is a Biologist by training, with a specialisation in Plant-Ecophysiology. In addition to being division head and group leader at KIT/IMK-IFU, she is a professor at the KIT department of Geography and Geoecology. Early in her career, she studied terrestrial ecosystem-atmosphere CO2 and water exchange with a range of measurement techniques. Over the last 15 years or so, she focused increasingly on global-scale modelling of the interactions between climate change, land-use change, and various terrestrial ecosystem properties, using Dynamic Global Vegetation models. She has been a Coordinating Lead Author in the Global Assessment of the IPBES (Int. Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), on chapter 4 “Future scenarios and projections”, Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC Special Report on land and climate change (chapter 1 “Setting the scene”) and a Lead Author in the IPCC 6th Assessment report (WG2, chapter on Terrestrial and Freshwater Ecosystems). Currently, she is acting as a Lead Author in the IPBES Nexus Assessment, chapter 2 (“Current status and past trends“). She has been involved for many years in a number of EC FP and nationally-funded projects related to Global Environmental Change, including being the co-coordinator of the project wildE (Climate-smart rewilding: ecological restoration for climate change mitigation, adaptation and biodiversity support in Europe).

Hannes Böttcher

Hannes Böttcher is the Team Leader of the group Biogenic Resources and Land Use in Oeko-Institut’s division of Energy and Climate Change. He received his MSc degree in forest sciences and ecology from the University of Gottingen (Germany) and his PhD from the University of Freiburg. Hannes Böttcher worked on and published research for 15 years on the following main topics: biomass potentials and sustainability criteria for the use of biomass, modelling of forest management options and their implications for the carbon balance in forests and the forestry sector and other environmental indicators, global monitoring of forests and activities for mitigating emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, as well as accounting rules in the land use, land use change and forestry sector (LULUCF) in international climate policy.

Calum Brown

Calum Brown researches the processes that cause changes in land management and ecosystems. He uses statistical and computational methods to try and understand these processes, and to explore how they might develop in the future. His background is in physics and ecology, and his PhD was on the ecology of tropical rainforests. He still works on forest ecology, but now mainly focuses on human land use and its interactions with climate change. This work involves modelling the ways in which land management decisions are made, attempting to build on knowledge of underlying social and environmental processes.

Mohamed Byari

Mohamed Byari is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research-Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), KIT-Campus Alpin, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. He earned his Ph.D. in 2022 at the university Abdelmalek Essaadi, Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of Tangier, Morocco, in Modelling and Control of Spatiotemporal Systems using 3D Cellular Automata with applications to wildfire phenomena. His thesis had two major achieved objectives: a theoretical study in the framework of complex system theory and the development of software to model, analyze and control the problem of wildfire. Currently, he is working on the CRAFTY model to support the modelling and analysis of policy pathways. The objective is to achieve the mitigation potential of European forests by focusing on the interactions between humans, land use, and climate change based on social and environmental processes.

Giuseppe Cardellini

Giuseppe graduated with a Masters in Forest and Environmental Sciences from the University of Molise in 2011. He then collaborated with the EcoGeoFor at the University of Molise working on projects related to the carbon accounting of forests before moving to Belgium in 2013 to begin his PhD done within the framework of the FP7 project FORMIT. In 2018, he completed a joint PhD between KU Leuven and the ULB with the title "Forest products: contribution to carbon storage and climate mitigation". In his PhD, Giuseppe studied the Life Cycle impact of the European wood sector and developed an LCA software for the dynamic accounting of the biogenic carbon fluxes in the wood sector. After receiving his PhD, he was a postdoc in the Chair of Wood Science of the Technical University of Munich specialising on the LCA impact of bio-based material and, in 2018, he joined the MOBI group of VUB. Now he is applying his Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment and research project management expertise at Energyville-VITO working on projects concerning the energy, building and bio-based materials sectors. Giuseppe has been part of the JRC expert group on bioeconomy and is currently the leader of the WP on wood products’ sustainability assessment in the Horizon Europe project ForestPaths. Giuseppe has published several peer-reviewed scientific papers related to LCA and climate change mitigation and carbon accounting in the forest and wood sector.

Rafał Chudy

Rafał Chudy has over 12 years of professional experience in project management within natural resources, forest economics, and finance. His research interests are linked to land-use economics, forest management options and investments. Rafal's research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and presentations at international investment and natural resource economics conferences. He holds a PhD in ecology and natural resource management (forest economics as a specialisation) from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Rafal is the Executive Editor of the Journal of Forest Business Research and the co-organizer of the International Forest Business Conference.

Ioan Dutcă

Ioan Dutcă is an associate professor at the Transilvania University of Brasov, Department of Silviculture, and his key role within ForestPaths is to conduct an uncertainty analysis for the EFISCEN Space model. His research mainly focuses on the improvement of forest biomass estimations, investigations on tree allometric relationships, error propagations in forest biomass estimations, and the use of terrestrial laser scanning in forestry.

Trishna Dutta

Trishna Dutta is a senior researcher in forest biodiversity at the European Forest Institute in Germany and contributes to the review of Climate and Biodiversity-mart forest management practices in WP1.

Annemarie Eckes-Shephard

Annemarie Eckes-Shephard has a BSc in Biological Sciences from Heidelberg, where she covered subjects such as molecular biology, microbiology, and plant biology. She wrote a thesis on modelling grass-fungal interactions, which she wrote during her exchange to the University of Guelph, Canada, and an MSci in Climate change from the University of East Anglia, UK, covering both physical science basis and societal interactions with climate change. Her thesis interrogated algal blooms and their speed to changes in the environment. She did her PhD at Cambridge University, UK on interrogating wood formation modelling frameworks for global applications. As a Scientific Researcher at Lund, she has so far worked on different strategies for parameterising the hydraulics-enabled version of LPJ-GUESS, and currently also co-coordinates forest demographic model benchmarking effort.

Diana Feliciano

Diana Feliciano holds a PhD in Geography, an MSc in Economics, and a five-year degree in Engineering with specialisation in forestry and natural resource management. Her research focuses on the role of land to deliver multiple benefits namely climate change adaptation and mitigation, sustainable food production, ecosystem services and rural prosperity taking into consideration the interconnections across spatial scales namely farm level, community level, regional level, national level, global level.

Marc Gramberger

Marc Gramberger is an expert in stakeholder engagement, moderation, scenario planning and strategic processes. He holds an M.A. in Political Science from the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in Political Sciences & International Relations from the University of Hamburg. With more than 20 years of experience, Marc has a distinctively strategic view on negotiations and has advised international corporations and organisations – from Novartis to the European Commission - in a long series of top-level negotiation and strategy processes, including negotiations between Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians on the future of water in the Middle East.

Alba Granados Aguero

Alba has worked in the public, non-profit and academic sectors in Peru and Belgium since 2014. She holds a Bachelor's in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and an MSc in Sustainable Development from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven of Belgium. Her areas of expertise are Payment for Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice and Indigenous affairs, Market-Based Instruments for the Conservation and Restoration of Forest Landscapes, and Forest Governance in Latin America and Europe. She has been involved in other Horizon2020 projects such as SINCERE and WaterLANDs, and she's currently also working on SUPERB as part of the Prospex-Institute team.

Marcus Lindner

Marcus Lindner is a principal scientist in the Resilience Programme of the European Forest Institute in Bonn, Germany. He will lead the review and assessment of climate and biodiversity-smart forest management practices in WP1 and the synthesis of forest management narratives for modelling in other WPs.

Marko Lovrić

Marko Lovrić is a researcher in ForestPaths, primarily focusing on WP1. He is a Senior Researcher at EFI’s Bioeconomy programme in Finland, holding a PhD from the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Freiburg. His background is in various approaches of social sciences, applied to different topics such as nature conservation, non-wood forest products, forest ecosystem services and international trade of forest products. He is also the Coordinator of the Horizon Europe project EUFORE - European Forest Research and Innovation Ecosystem.

Alexander Moiseyev

Alexander Moiseyev is involved in WP3 & 4 providing expertise in forest sector scenario modelling based on the global forest sector model EFI-GTM. He is a senior researcher in EFI’s Bioeconomy programme in Finland. He obtained his PhD degree in Forest Economics from Moscow Forest State University. He has more than 20 years of research experience in international research projects dealing with climate change, sustainability, trade and economic impact assessments.

Amelie Müller

Amelie Müller graduated with a Master's in Industrial Ecology from the Technical University Delft and University Leiden in 2022, after obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg in 2020. During her studies, she specialised in quantifying the environmental impacts of technologies using Life Cycle Assessment. She has applied her life cycle assessment expertise in research projects at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems and at the Institute for Networked Energy Systems of the German Aerospace Center as part of her graduation projects. In 2022, Amelie started her PhD at VITO and Leiden University with the title “Dynamic, prospective and combinatorial Life Cycle Assessment of forest-based products” within the Horizon Europe project ForestPaths.

Carolina Natel de Moura

Carolina Natel de Moura joined the Global Land Ecosystem Modelling group in January 2022 with an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship. She is interested in the application of machine- and deep-learning methods to Earth System Science problems. She will be implementing deep learning methods to build an emulator of the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model LPG-GUESS, to estimate forest carbon cycle and timber production. The output of this emulator will be used in the coupled land use and vegetation model LandSyMM (Land System Modular Model). This research project will allow the study of the effect of several forest management options on the future forest carbon sink in the context of climate change.

Mihai-Daniel Niță

Mihai-Daniel Niță is a professor of Remote Sensing, GIS, and Watershed Management at the Transilvania University of Brasov, Department of Forest Engineering. He is involved in research projects regarding forest management and monitoring, mainly as an RS-GIS expert on topics like LULUCF (land use, land-use change, and forestry) using remote sensing and drone mapping, modelling habitat distributions for species and evaluating Forest Ecosystem Services (FES). His latest research is focused on exploring the long-term effect of humans on forest ecosystems assessing the forest disturbances based on SfM (Structure from Motion), DISI (Declassified Intelligence Satellite Imagery), and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS).

Cleo Orfanidou

Cleo Orfanidou is involved in WP4 and is working on the wood material flow analysis and the quantification of the climate change mitigation potentials of Europe's forest sector. She is a junior researcher in EFI’s Bioeconomy programme in Finland. She has an MSc in Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark and she is a PhD student in Bioproduct Technology at Aalto University. Her research focuses on the life cycle environmental sustainability of harvested wood products and their end-uses, such as timber buildings.

Katriina Pajari

Katriina Pajari is the Project Manager (Admin.) of ForestPaths. She is a Research Support Officer at EFI (Finland) with a long experience in event management, coordination, development and training, and project administration and management. Besides ForestPaths, she is working among others in the pre-award and GAP phases, and provides overall support in implementation, especially in Horizon projects at EFI.

Tom Pugh

Tom Pugh is a scientist interested in interactions and feedback between the terrestrial biosphere, people and the global climate system, which he primarily investigates using computer models and big data synthesis. His work in ForestPaths is focused on the development and application of the ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS, which will be used to explore the impacts of climate and management interactions in European forests. He is the WP3 leader.

Judith Reise

Judith Reise joined the Biogenic Resources and Land Use team in September 2019 as a research associate in the Energy and Climate Protection division at the Oeko-Institut. Her work focuses on the climate change mitigation potential of carbon-rich ecosystems as well as their protection, restoration and sustainable management. Judith Reise studied "Biodiversity and Ecology" (B.Sc.) at the University of Göttingen from 2006 to 2009, specialising in biodiversity research, nature conservation and vegetation ecology. In 2012, she completed her Master's degree in "Global Change Ecology" at the University of Bayreuth, specialising in ecological modelling for impact analysis of climate and land use changes on biodiversity. In addition, she completed a Master's course at Stockholm University on "Applied Marine Conservation Ecology" in 2011.

Clint Richards

Clint has worked for 15 years as a risk advisor in the U.S., Seoul, Tokyo, and the Hague, focusing on geopolitics, culture, and individuals. As the Director of Intelligence at Pinkerton he engaged internal and external stakeholders to design products that informed and protected local institutions, businesses, and individuals during natural disasters, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ensuing supply chain shortages.

Mark Rounsevell

Mark Rounsevell is а Professor of Land Use Change at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Institute of Geography & Geoecology) and Head of IFU’s Land Use Change Research Group. His research focuses on the human dimensions of environmental change, including the analysis of socio-ecological systems, land use and land cover change and the impacts of climate change on natural resources. He combines qualitative, social elicitation methods with social simulation models to undertake experiments on human-environment interactions and works with a number of different modelling approaches from local to global scale levels, both in the present and for future environmental change scenarios.

Anna Sapundzhieva

Anna Sapundzhieva is a science communication expert at Pensoft Publishers with long-standing expertise in the dissemination and communication of multiple EU-funded research projects. She is specialised in the full cycle of communication and dissemination activities, including the coordination and execution of social media campaigns, public and media relations. Anna is also an expert in the conceptualisation and implementation of plans for the communications, dissemination and exploitation of scientific results.

Mart-Jan Schelhaas

Mart-Jan Schelhaas is a researcher in European forestry and is involved in the forest resource modelling in ForestPaths. He has 20 years of experience in projects at the national and European scale, dealing with forest inventories and management, impacts of natural disturbances, wood supply issues, trade, ecosystem services, climate change, carbon, and sustainability issues in general. Mart-Jan is responsible for the scientific part of the Dutch National Forest Inventory and for the maintenance and development of the core forest models of Wageningen Environmental Research.

Cornelius Senf

Cornelius Senf is a senior scientist at the Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Group of the Technical University of Munich. Educated as a geographer with a specialisation in terrestrial remote sensing, his research focuses on the application of remote sensing in landscape and disturbance ecology. He has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed papers and pioneered the field of forest disturbance mapping in Europe.

Tudor Stăncioiu

Tudor Stăncioiu is a professor of Forest Ecology and Forest Stand Dynamics at the Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Forestry from the Faculty of Silviculture and Forest Engineering (within the same university) in 1996. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California – Berkeley (USA) (class of 2003). Before joining academia, he worked for the state forest administration. His work at present is focused on forest dynamics, species-habitat relationships, and the sustainable management of forests (including certification).

Ajdin Starcevic

Ajdin Starcevic is a Junior Researcher at Wageningen Environmental Research. He holds a double MSc degree in European Forestry from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna and the University of Eastern Finland. At WENR he works on several EU projects: Forest-Paths, SUPERB and Climate-Smart Forestry.

Hans Verkerk

Hans Verkerk is the coordinator of ForestPaths. He is a principal scientist in the Bioeconomy programme of the European Forest Institute (Finland) and he leads a team on Climate-Smart Forestry. He holds an MSc degree in Forest and Nature Management from Wageningen University and obtained his PhD degree with distinction from the University of Eastern Finland. He has been involved in studies on European forest resource assessments, woody biomass availability, forest ecosystem services and climate change impacts and mitigation.

Alba Viana Soto

Alba Viana Soto is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Group of the Technical University of Munich. Her research focuses on understanding the dynamics of forest ecosystems using remote sensing data (optical and Lidar), with a specific focus on forest recovery and forest disturbance mapping.

Laura von Vittorelli

Laura von Vittorelli is a fully qualified lawyer and joined the Oeko-Institut's team in November 2021 as a researcher in the Environmental Law & Governance department. She studied law with a focus on European and international law in Heidelberg, Bologna and Berlin (Humboldt). Her work at the Oeko-Institut focuses on national and European environmental law with a focus on climate and biodiversity issues.

Hinke Wiersma

Hinke Wiersma is a Junior Researcher at Wageningen Environmental Research in the field of forestry. She is mainly working on projects surrounding forest genetic resources; working on provenance research and genebank development among others. Next to this, she is involved in more social science, policy and communication-related topics based on the expertise from her completed MSc in Forest and Nature Conservation policy at Wageningen University. In this capacity she is part of the ForestPaths project, working on the more social science aspects.

Martin Wittenbrink

Martin Wittenbrink is a PhD Student at IMK-IFU. After graduating in Meteorology and Physics of the Earth and Atmosphere at the University of Bonn, he started working at the German Weather Service (DWD) for a research project called “DeepRain”, where he developed spatial precipitation postprocessing methods. At KIT/IMK-IFU, he works on the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model LPJ-GUESS and uses it for simulations to evaluate different forest management scenarios. His research interest focuses on atmospheric and ecosystem modelling and especially the interactions between those two spheres.

Franziska Wolff

Franziska Wolff (M.A.) is the Head of the Environmental Law & Governance division of the Oeko-Institut. As a political scientist and economist (Universities of Freiburg and Glasgow) she has been working on issues of political and social governance at national and international levels for over fifteen years. One focus is on governance issues in the context of land use and natural resource management, including forests.

Nikol Yovcheva

Nikol Yovcheva is a science communication expert at Pensoft Publishers. She has a BSc in Modern languages, cultures and communication, as well as two MSc in Communication and Information and in Digital Marketing and Communication. Nikol is also involved in the communication and dissemination activities of several H2020 projects focusing on topics such as biodiversity, forest health and pollination services.