Cascading Risks for Ecosystems

Tom is a senior lecturer at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, and a Reader in Biosphere-Atmosphere Exchange at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham. He is interested in interactions and feedbacks between the terrestrial biosphere, climate, and people, with a particular focus on forest dynamics; questions which he primarily investigates using computer models and big data synthesis.

Tom completed his PhD at Lancaster University, studying the effects of tropical rainforests and oil palm plantations on tropospheric chemistry. He then carried out a postdoc at Lancaster investigating the interactions between plants and urban air pollution. In 2012, he moved to IMK-IFU in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, where he broadened his horizons to work with global vegetation and climate models on questions of land-use change, tree mortality, and food security. In 2016 he joined the University of Birmingham and in 2020 took up his current position at Lund University.

Chantelle is a senior climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre. She is involved in the co-ordination of FireMIP, and works with the fire model INFERNO within JULES and UKESM. She is interested in the interactions of fire with vegetation and the carbon cycle. Her work has focused on fire interactions and seasonal forecasting of fire in South American ecosystems, global future fire projections, and attribution of burnt area and fire weather to climate change.

Chantelle gained her PhD from the University of Exeter in 2019, developing fire-vegetation feedbacks in JULES and studying the effects of fire on terrestrial ecosystems across a range of timescales. Chantelle first joined the Met Office in 2009 as an undergraduate placement student whilst studying Geography at the University of Cambridge, and moved into climate science in 2013.

Kirsten Thonicke is Deputy Head of Research Department on Earth System Analysis and Working Group Leader on Ecosystem in Transitions of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Her research work focuses on how climate and land-use change transform ecosystems, fire, and biodiversity. She is the Speaker of the Leibniz Research Alliance "Biodiversity."

After graduating from the Institute for Geoecology at Potsdam University, Germany, she worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. In 2005 she was offered the Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Bristol, Great Britain, where she coupled mechanistic global fire models into climate-vegetation models at the School of Geography. Kirsten Thonicke joined PIK in 2007.