Hans Verbeeck - TREECLIMBERS

Onderstaande beschrijving is in het Engels:

Hans Verbeeck.jpgHans Verbeeck (°1979) graduated as a Bio-engineer (Land and Forest management) at UGent (2002). He made his PhD at Antwerp University with a thesis on the modelling of carbon and water balances of temperate forests (2007). He was a post doc researcher at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (France) holding a Marie Curie fellowship. In 2009 he returned to UGent as post-doctoral assistant at the Laboratory of Plant Ecology. There he developed a research line on ecosystem modelling of tropical forests. He also initiated several fieldwork projects in tropical forests (DR Congo, Ecuador). In 2014 he spend four months as a visiting scientist at the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK.

End 2014 Hans Verbeeck received an ERC starting grant for the TREECLIMBERS project. In 2015 he was appointed as research professor at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering. Within the department of Applied Ecology and Environmental Biology het established the research group CAVElab (Computational and Applied Vegetation Ecology, www.cavelab.ugent.be ). Hans Verbeeck is teaching several coursers at UGent, including ‘Terrestrial Ecology’ and ‘Meteorology and Climatology’.

Contact:

Publications: https://biblio.ugent.be/person/801001712816

Modelling lianas as key drivers of tropical forest responses to climate change (TREECLIMBERS)

Tropical forests play an essential role in the global carbon cycle. Lianas are key components of these forests and recent observations have revealed that lianas have been increasing in abundance and biomass over the last two decades. Liana proliferation might be a key adaptation mechanism of tropical forests to climate change, with large impacts on the long term tropical forest carbon balance. However, no single terrestrial ecosystem model currently includes lianas. The TREECLIMBERS project therefore aims (1) to understand how lianas influence tropical forest functioning and (2) to assess for the first time the impact of lianas on the carbon balance of tropical forests, by building the first vegetation model that accounts for lianas and by integrating available and new data on liana functioning with innovative terrestrial LiDAR observations of the 3D structure of the forest canopy. Intensive field campaigns are planned in Panama, French Guiana and Brazil.