Current ClimBEco PhD students

My current research focuses on how warming and other environmental changes in the Arctic tundra drive changes in plant community productivity through shifts in functional traits and community assemblages (such as boreal shrub encroachment). I will use a combination of growth chamber experiments and field observations to tackle this question.

In my PhD project I am investigating the link between forest management, fungal communities and the mobilization of DOC and iron. I aim to increase our understanding of how decomposition patterns differ between fungal functional groups depending on their ecology, and how that ultimately affects brownification of surface waters.

I am a PhD student in Lund at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science. My research focuses on modelling grass- and croplands in a mechanistic way which will help to better estimate how these ecosystems respond to environmental changes or contribute to ecosystem services in the future. One major focus of my project is on integrating perennial grain crops into the mechanistic ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS to evaluate their potential as sustainable food crops on larger scales in the future.

As part of my PhD, I’m trying to understand the Arctic tundra. Luckily, I’ve been introduced to the first large-scale, long-term Arctic warming experiment: the International Tundra Experiment (ITEX). For more than 30 years, researchers around the world have warmed hundreds of plots to study how climate change affects these ecosystems. My role? To deeply investigate one ITEX site in the mountains of Northern Sweden. I want to understand: 1) why warming affects the carbon cycle so differently across plant communities, by untangling the roles of vegetation and soil through plant ecophysiology and soil microbial ecology, and 2) what is happening when almost no-one dares to look, in winter?

My research is focused on aerosol technology, particularly in the context of transitioning to sustainable energy systems. I aim to investigate how alternative energy affects aerosol emissions and human exposure, with applications in aviation and industrial processes. One part of the work involves experimental studies on emissions from sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), while the other focuses on occupational exposure to aerosols in biogas energy plants. The overall aim is to improve understanding of the environmental and health implications of future energy systems.

The main focus of my project is satellite-based remote sensing (SRS) and its application in arctic vegetation monitoring, as well as biodiversity assessment. I will mainly look at the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to map out areas of greening and browning in Abisko, comparing the capabilities of the Sentinel-2 satellite (high spatial and low spectral resolution) with the more recent EnMAP satellite (low spatial and high spectral resolution). I will look for ways to compare and hopefully combine data from these two platforms, and then move on to looking for biodiversity markers in SRS data in rural areas of southern Sweden

My PhD project investigates the key drivers of drought impacts in boreal forests. Specifically, I aim to determine why the remaining primary forests in Sweden were more resistant to the 2018 drought than managed forests, through a mix of field measurements, tree-core analysis and modelling. This will provide insights into the ways that forest management influences the drought-stability and carbon storage of these ecosystems.

My PhD project aims at investigating how climate change influences trees in tropical montane rainforests. I utilize natural gradients and experimental manipulation of climatic variables to study the responses to a hotter and drier climate. I want to understand the physiological mechanisms underlying these responses as well as different species' ability to tolerate and acclimate to a changing climate, to better understand future changes in the community composition of these ecosystems.

Root systems play important yet poorly understood roles in energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles, especially in Arctic tundra. During my PhD, I will focus on the responses of Arctic tundra plant root traits to biotic and abiotic drivers and their impacts on ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycling, with the aim of developing a dynamic root module in LPJ-GUESS that encompasses carbon allocation, dynamic root distribution, and material transport.

Lovisa Rosenquist Ohlsson is a PhD student at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, as well as the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, working with geographical information systems and satellite data. Her research explores climate risk and adaptation in the Middle East, with a particular focus on displaced populations.

My research focuses on detecting anomalies and out-of-distribution patterns in a variety of applications. From detecting deforestation and investigating growth patterns in agriculture to breast cancer detection and point-of-care diagnosis, my work focuses on how mathematics and machine learning can be used as an interdisciplinary tool in other research areas in a responsible and transparent way.

My research is focused on non-exhaust emissions (NEE) from road transport, such as wear particles from brakes, tyres and roads. This involves both laboratory studies to investigate particle characteristics, as well as toxicological studies and workplace exposure measurements. Improving our understanding of these particles and their effect on health and environment becomes increasingly important considering current efforts to electrify the vehicle fleet and can help inform future policy.

In my research I delve into the human-more than human entanglements that sustain the role of environmental defenders who are protecting ecologically sensitive and highly biodiverse ecosystems in the Andes and the Andean-Amazon. I use participatory action research as a key methodology, intertwining legal empowerment tools with feminist and art-based methods to support the role of defenders as agents of radical transformations towards more just and sustainable futures.

My research focuses on soil fungal interactions and their impact on biogeochemical nutrient cycles and fluxes of respired CO2 from soils. To this end, I study these interactions at the molecular level by characterizing their metabolites using several spectroscopy methods and studying their biochemical pathways using transcriptomics.

My research project focuses on exploring the potential climate benefits of perennial- compared to conventional annual cropping systems. Perennial crops, with deep and extensive roots and no-tillage requirements, have the ability to retain water and nutrients and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. My PhD focuses on field measurements of land-atmosphere exchange to compare these two systems.

My Phd research focuses on the microbial role in carbon sequestration within perennial agroecosystems. More specifically, we trying to understand the microbial contribution in transforming plant-derived labile carbon into a long-persistent soil carbon pool, and also concerning the microbial carbon sequestration response under different climate scenarios.

My research focuses on climate change-vegetation interactions, ecosystem modeling, and the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum (SPAC). Currently, I am working on projects that model the impacts of extreme weather (e.g., drought) on tree growth in both forests and urban areas, spanning scales from local to regional (CoupModel and LPJGUESS).