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This site provides access to result of the PorTree project, a project funded by
the FOEN/WSL research programme Forests and Climate Change (Wald &
Klimawandel).
The main objectives of the PorTree project were: (1) to calibrate models of
habitat suitability for important forest trees in Switzerland and surrounding
areas; (2) to do so by fitting models on data that originate from all forest
inventories available throughout the European Alps in order to capture the
environmental niche of the species more completely; and (3) to project the
habitat suitability of these species under climate change to the scale of
Switzerland in order to assess the likely effects on the re-distribution of
suitable habitats. In addition, we prepared all climate data for the many
projects of the research programme.
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Collaborators |
Many people have contributed to the PorTree project. These
are all listed below. During the project, both, Niklaus E. Zimmermann (WSL) and
Achilleas Psomas (WSL) have most significantly contributed to the project and
have written the reports, generated the website and all maps with updates.
Prof. Dr. Niklaus E.
Zimmermann: was originally trained as field
botanist at the University of Berne, Switzerland, where he completed his MSc in
Geobotany. He carried out a PhD on modelling the spatial distribution of alpine
vegetation both at WSL and at the University of Berne between 1993 and 1996.
Until 1999 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Utah State University, where
he was both working with dynamic forest succession models and with empirical
species distribution models. He also contributed significantly with GIS and
Remote Sensing methods in several research projects. In 1999 he started a postdoc
at WSL. In 2005 he got a permanent position at WSL as a research scientist. From
2006 until 2013 he was the head of the research unit Landscape Dynamics at WSL,
and since 2007 he is a member of the WSL board of directors. Since 2014 he is
adjunct professor for Macroecology at ETHZ.
He specialized in plant ecology, macroecology, biodiversity research and in
assessing global change impacts on species and ecosystems. More recently, he
combined evolutionary and phylogenetic analyses with ecological models and
analyses in order to solve macroecological questions. GIS, Remote Sensing, and
spatial analyses are important assets of his research. He has published >130 ISI
papers, has an h-index of 41, and has accumulated >9800 citations in the web of
science, with an average citation rate per paper ~80.
Dr.
Achilleas Psomas:
was originally trained as a forest ecologist at the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2003 he received his MSc in GIS and Remote Sensing from
Wageningen University in The Netherlands. After working as GIS and Remote Sensing
expert at the Research Station Agroscope Reckenholz-Tänikon (ART) and at the
Swiss Federal Institute WSL in Switzerland he started his PhD in remote sensing
at the University of Zurich. He received his PhD title in the field of
hyperspectral remote sensing in 2008 and after that did a postodoc at the
University of Zurich and WSL until the end of 2010. Since 2011 he is working as
a support scientist and GIS/remote sensing expert at the research unit
Landscape Dynamics at WSL.
The following people have contributed to PorTree:
Prof. Dr. Signe Normand, Dr. Dirk R. Schmatz, Dr. Eliane S. Meier, Dr. Matthias
Dobbertin†, Prof. Dr. Peter B. Pearman, Dr. Esther Thürig, PD Dr.
Janine Bolliger, Prof. Dr. Felix Kienast. |