This seminar is hosted by the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests, an Oxford Martin School Centre

Speaker: Helene Muller-Landau, PhD, Staff Scientist, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Summary: Tropical forests account for a disproportionate share of global forest carbon stocks and of global tree diversity, and their ecosystem services and biodiversity are under threat from global change. Understanding these changing forests is not only a major challenge in fundamental research, but also critical to forest conservation and climate protection efforts

The seminar will be followed by drinks in the King's Arms

About the speaker

Helene Muller-Landau is a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), where she leads the Forest Carbon Research Initiative for the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) - ForestGEO network of large forest dynamics plots. She uses a combination of empirical and theoretical approaches to investigate the ecosystem and community ecology of tropical forests.

She did her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Statistics at Swarthmore College, her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and postdoctoral work at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and at Princeton University before taking a position as assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. In 2008 she moved to her current position at STRI.