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Professor Ram Oren - Duke University, North Carolina, USA
Professor Ram Oren is currently working as a Professor of Ecology / Ecophysiology at the Nicholas School of the Environmental and Earth Sciences, Duke University, USA. Professor Oren has worked in the fields of Tree Physiology, Physiological Ecology, Forest Management and Global Change in the last 21 years in USA and Germany after completing his PhD in Physiological Ecology at Oregon State University in 1984 and postdoctoral research in 1986 at University of Bayreuth, Germany. Professor Oren has published more than 110 refereed papers (including some in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Ecology and Plant Physiology), with 40 refereed journal and book chapters in the past 5 years.
Professor Oren is currently on the Editorial Board of Oecologia, and the Editorial Board of Tree Physiology; a regular reviewer for many international journals (including Nature and Science); advisor to the Integrated Carbon Cycle Research Program (ICCR) 2004 – Science Implementation Strategy for Terrestrial Systems; a reviewer of proposals for USDA Forest Service, NASA, NSF, and EPA, and the European Commission’s Environmental Research Programme; a member of Canada Research Chairs Program College of Reviewers since 2003.
Professor Sune Linder - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Professor Linder is currently working as a Professor of Forest Ecology at the Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden, and for the last 15 years as Adjunct Professor at the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, USA. Professor Linder has in the last 35 years worked in the fields of Tree Physiology, Physiological Ecology, and impacts of Global Change on forests. Professor Linder has published more than 120 refereed papers (including some in Nature and Science), with 40 refereed journal and book chapters in the past five years.
Professor Linder is currently on the Editorial Board of Trees, the Advisory committee of Eurasian Journal of Forest Research, and a regular reviewer for many international journals.
Experimental Assessment
Modelling
Professor Zhihong Xu - Griffith University
Professor Zhihong Xu has been working in the fields of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling in terrestrial ecosystems; C isotope discrimination, oxygen isotope composition and tree water use efficiency; soil fertility and plant nutrition; application of stable isotope (15N and 13C) tracing techniques; development and application of 13C-, 31P-, 15N- and 14N-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for studying plant and soil processes on C and nutrient cycling; soil biology and biochemistry (including bio-molecular approaches to soil microbial ecology); and molecular tree nutrition in the last 25 years. He has published more than 120 refereed journal and conference papers, with 54 of them in the past 5 years. In the first application of 14N-NMR to soil humic acid (HA), Professor Xu and his colleagues have discovered the surprising existence of nitrate-N in soil HA, with the HA nitrate-N closely related to soil N availability and rather responsive to ecosystem management such as residue management regimes and fuel reduction burning in contrasting forest ecosystems. This newly discovered HA nitrate-N is biologically active and can be a significant part of total N in the HAs.
In addition, Professor Xu has developed and applied advanced stable isotope and NMR techniques to study soil and plant processes on C and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. More recently, he has also been actively involved in major new research initiatives on the innovative use of bio-molecular techniques in studying soil and plant processes on C and nutrient cycling in response to local management practices and global climate change. In the past 10 years, Professor Xu, together with his colleagues and collaborators in Australia and overseas, has secured more than $10M of external funding support, with most of them from the national competitive grants. Professor Xu is currently co-supervisor of 4 postdoctoral and research fellows, 9 PhD students, 1 research assistant and 5 visiting scientists, with 4 postdoctoral research fellows, 5 PhD students, 8 visiting scientists and 4 honours students successfully completing their projects under his co-supervision. Professor Xu has regularly reviewed manuscripts for 25 refereed international journals. Professor Xu is currently a consulting editor / subject editor / section editor / Editor-in-Chief for international journals - Pedosphere, Plant and Soil, Environmental Science & Pollution Research and Journal of Soils & Sediments. Professor Xu has assessed many national and international competitive grant applications as invited by the relevant funding agencies.
Prof. Chris E. Johnson - Syracuse University
Chris Johnson has a variety of interests in the broad area of environmental chemistry. Much of his work involves the study of forest soil chemistry. He is actively involved in research on the chemistry of natural organic matter, which plays an important role in soil fertility, trace metal transport, and the acid-base status of soils and natural waters. He is particularly interested in the characterization of organic matter using advanced analytical tools such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, liquid chromatography, and capillary electrophoresis. Professor Johnson is also involved in the interdisciplinary study of biogeochemical cycles at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the U.S. He has ongoing research interests in the fate of trace metals (Pb, Zn, Cu, Ni) in forest soils and landscapes; the effects of clear-cut logging on soils and drainage waters; and the changing acid-base chemistry of soils historically affected by acid rain. He is involved in an ambitious long-term project in which wollastonite, CaSiO3, was added to an entire watershed at Hubbard Brook in an attempt to replace Ca leached from the soil by acid rain.
Chris Johnson holds bachelors (Civil Engineering), masters (Statistics), and Ph.D. (Geology) degrees, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi, and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Czech Republic in 1994. He has served as a visiting faculty member at Charles University in Prague and Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. A full-time faculty member of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Syracuse University, Dr. Johnson teaches courses in environmental chemistry, soil chemistry, environmental data analysis, and surveying. He has been an associate editor in the Forest, Range, and Wildland Soils division of the Soil Science Society of America Journal since January, 2000.
Professor Ross McMurtrie – School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of New South Wales
Professor Ross McMurtrie is a research leader in the field of process-based modelling of terrestrial ecosystem function. His modelling work have been directed towards understanding the roles played by plant eco-physiology, changing atmospheric and climatic conditions, and soil-nutrient cycling, in regulating the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems over contrasting timescales. Research over the last decade has focused on (1) impacts of climate change and land-use change on terrestrial productivity and carbon storage, (2) sustainable productivity of managed forests, and (3) modelling of carbon-exchange and productivity of forests in water- and nutrient-limited environments. His research in each area combines development of detailed mechanistic simulation models and analyses of more mathematically tractable simplified models of ecosystem function.
His forest ecosystem models, BIOMASS and G'DAY, have been used to investigate impacts of climate and land-use change and sustainability, and to simulate carbon/water/nutrient fluxes of grassland, savanna and forest ecosystems in Australia, Africa, India, New Zealand, Sweden and USA. His lab at UNSW has made an important contribution to research on plant ecosystem function by showing that several empirically observed plant and ecosystem phenomena can be explained using relatively simple mathematical models. This work includes modelling of: acclimation of plant photosynthesis and respiration to altered light, temperature and CO2; determinants of light, carbon and nutrient-use efficiencies on short and long timescales; soil feedback effects on the growth response to high CO2; and forest sustainability. He is currently PI for the Hawkesbury Forest Experiment, which is Australia’s new field experiment on the impacts of high CO2 and reduced rainfall on forests.
Innovative technologies and novel approaches
Advances in established methods
"Innovation and global change - Application of modern analytical tools (NMR, MALDI-TOF, XANES) for revealing C and N sequestration mechanisms in forest soils."
Heike Knicker, Caroline Preston, Jörg Prietzel , J ürgen Thieme
PD Dr. habil Heike Knicker - Technische Universität München, Germany.
Assistant Professor Heike Knicker is working in the field of soil biochemistry at the Lehrstuhl für Bodenkunde of the Technische Universität München, Germany. One of her main interests is the organic C and N stabilization in soils and sediments applying mostly solid-state 13C and 15N NMR spectroscopy and isotope-labelling approaches. Aside from projects examining the role of organic nitrogen during organic matter sequestration, she is currently involved in research on the impact of vegetation fires on the composition and humification pattern of soil organic matter in forest and grassland soils in Mediterranean and tropical regions. Other projects comprise the formation and stabilization of organo-mineral aggregates and the role of iron oxides within the stabilization process. A further subject of interest is the impact of bioremediation strategies of N-pollutants on soil organic matter composition.
Dr. Heike Knicker has introduced solid state 15N NMR as a routine approach to soil and geochemistry, demonstrating that in soil and sediments natural organic N occurs as amide-N. She was able to obtain the first solid-state 15N NMR spectra of coals. Applying 2D double cross polarization 15N 13C NMR spectroscopy, she gave the first direct evidence that under biotic conditions the transformation products of the explosive TNT are covalently bound to soil organic matter and thus immobilized.
In total she has published 100 papers in refereed international journals half of which were published during the last 5 years. She is subject editor for international journals such as Geoderma, Soil Biology and Biochemistry, Journal of Soil & Sediments. She is currently supervising 2 PhD- and 2 master students and co-supervising 4 visiting PhD fellows. International colaborations are with France, Spain, Brazil, Argentina and Australia.
Professor David Myrold - Oregon State University
Professor David Myrold is a member of the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, U.S.A., where he has taught and done research in forest soils and soil microbiology for 23 years. In addition to maintaining an active research lab, he heads a Microbial Observatory at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and directs an interdisciplinary graduate training program in the Subsurface Biosphere. His current research centers on the linkage between microbial composition and function in soil ecosystems, with particular emphasis on nitrogen (N) and carbon (C) cycling.
During his career, Professor Myrold has studied all the major processes of the N cycle: denitrification in agricultural and forest soils, and in groundwater systems; the N2-fixing symbiosis between Frankia and actinorhizal plants; and N mineralization and nitrification. Much of this research has used 15N tracer and isotope dilution techniques. Professor Myrold helped develop many innovative applications of stable isotopes to soil studies, including the first application of nonlinear parameter estimation to analyze 15N isotope dilution data, applying reaction-diffusion modeling to measure subsurface denitrification using 15N2 gas emission, the first demonstration of net transfer of C through ectomycorrhizal connections between different tree species using dual 13C- and 14C-CO2 labeling, and the first application of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to measure 15N and 13C assimilation by individual bacterial cells and fungal hyphae. His laboratory has also been active in using molecular methods (e.g., PLFA, PCR-based analysis of ribosomal and functional genes, gene sequencing) to study the composition of microbial communities and their relationship to C and N cycling processes in soil. This includes following the incorporation of 13C-labeled substrates into microbial PLFAs.
Professor Myrold has hosted 13 visiting scientists, and supervised 9 postdoctoral researchers, 11 PhD students, and 14 MS students. He has published more than 75 refereed journal articles and numerous book chapters, including chapters about soil N cycling in widely used textbooks. He is a technical editor or member of the editorial boards of: Soil Science Society of America Journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Soil Biology & Biochemistry, and FEMS Microbiology Ecology. Professor Myrold has frequently served on review panels for national and international funding agencies. He is a fellow in the American Society of Agronomy and Soil Science Society of America. Professor Myrold will use research done in his laboratory and in collaboration with Drs. Peter Bottomley, Mona Högberg, Peter Högberg, and Elizabeth Sulzman as the basis for a keynote presentation: “Linking microbial communities to activity in soil with molecular and stable isotope techniques” under the Sub-theme—Advances in established methods of the Symposium Theme 2.
Responding to global change
Sustaining ecosystem health
Maintaining environmental sustainability
Evaluating and monitoring
Professor John Cairney is Director of the Centre for Plant and Food Science at the University of Western Sydney. His research interests are largely in the ecology and physiology of soil fungi, including those that form symbiotic mycorrhizal associations. Research over the past 25 years has included investigations of the physiology of fungal mycelia in forest soil, nutrient and carbon transfer and acquisition in ectomycorrhizal associations, interactions between mycorrhizal fungi and pollutants, molecular investigations of population and community ecology of ectomycorrhizal and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi and how forest management influences communities of soil-dwelling fungi. This work includes collaborations with a range of institutions in Australia and overseas, has been largely funded by the Australian Research Council in recent years and has resulted in > 130 refereed publications in international journals.
Prof Cairney is currently a Section Editor of Plant and Soil, an Editor of Mycological Research, and Associate Editor of Canadian Journal of Forest Research and a Member of the Editorial Advisory Board of New Phytologist.
T.H. DeLuca - The Wilderness Society,
Dr. Thomas H. DeLuca is a senior scientist with The Wilderness Society, a non-government organization dedicated to the preservation of wild and natural landscapes. Prior to joining the Wilderness Society, Dr. DeLuca spent 12 years as a professor at the University of Montana and remains an adjunct professor of Forest Soils at the University. Dr. DeLuca also serves as a guest professor of Ecology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå Sweden and is an affiliate professor of soil science at Montana State University. Dr. DeLuca holds a PhD in Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry from Iowa State University, an MS in Soils from Montana State University, and a BS in Soil Science from the University of Wisconsin.
Over the course of his scientific career, Dr. DeLuca has studied how natural and anthropogenic disturbance influence soil C, N, and P cycling. More recently, Dr. DeLuca has focused on effect of fire and fire exclusion on soil processes and whether forest restoration efforts will effectively yield natural ecosystem function. His works include short and long term studies on soil processes in natural and restored forest stands, studies on the influence of wildfire generated charcoal on soil processes, and studies on N fixation in feather mosses in boreal ecosystems. Dr. DeLuca is the author of over 60 publications in refereed journals including contributions in Nature, Science, and Ecology. He is an elected officer in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is an active member of the Soil Science Society of America, the Ecological Society of America, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Professor Peter Attiwill - University of Melbourne
Professor Peter Attiwill (BSc, PhD) has 45 years of teaching and research experience in plant ecology. He has more than 170 publications, particularly in eucalypt and bushfire ecology. He is co-author of a number of books including Forest Soils and Nutrient Cycles (MUP, 1987) and co-editor of Nutrition of Eucalypts (CSIRO Publishing, 1996) and Ecology: An Australian Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2003, 2006). He was among the pioneers of research on soils and nutrition in Australia’s native forests, and his many PhD students now hold major positions in universities, CSIRO and state departments. He has been involved with the boards of a number of international journals and is currently Editor-in-Chief, Forest Ecology and Management.
Peter is working on long-term studies of growth and nutrient cycling in mountain ash forests, and is collaborating with Professor Mark Adams on a book aimed to bring some commonsense to the management of fire in Australia’s forests. He retired from The University of Melbourne in 2001, and is now Principal Fellow in Botany and Senior Fellow in the School of Historical Studies, The University of Melbourne. He is a member of the Stretton Group, a small group that aims bring some commonsense and action to the management of fire in Victoria. He is a Director of the Natural Resources Conservation League and of the Western Port Seagrass Partnership.
Peter is a collector of early glass and of early kerosene lamps. He is Curator of the University of Melbourne’s major collection of Georgian and Victorian glass (housed at University House), and is President of the Australian Lamplighters Guild – a group dedicated to the collection and restoration of kerosene lamps.
