Invited Speakers
Professor David Whitehead
David leads the FRST Programme Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Terrestrial Biosphere and his specialist area of research is in measuring and modeling the biophysical regulation of carbon exchange for forest ecosystems. David also teaches at the University of Canterbury and Lincoln University, mentors students and judges at science fairs. He is also one of four invited judges for Environment Canterbury's biennial Resource Management Awards. David has a strong international publications record with 120 peer-reviewed papers and is a member of the Editorial Boards for Functional Ecology, Tree Physiology and New Zealand Journal of Forestry Science.
Presentation title: Forests as carbon sinks - benefits and consequences
David will be presenting the public lecture at the State Library of Victoria, 07 October 2010.
Dr Michael Ryan
Mike Ryan is a Reaseach Ecologist with the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station. He has over 20 years of research experience in ecophysiology of forests and factors influencing carbon exchange and accumulation. His intensive research sites have included temperate forests (Colorado, Wyoming, Oregon), boreal forests (Canada), and tropical plantations and native forests (Costa Rica, Brazil, Hawaii). He received his PhD from Oregon State University in 1987 and did a post-doc with the Ecosystems Center at Woods Hole.
Presentation title: Unsolved Problems in Whole Tree Physiology (Co-author Ram Oren)
Theme: Water and Carbon Fluxes, Pools and Turnover
Sponsored by Tree Physiology
Dr Maurizio Mencuccini
Maurizio has been studying forest ecosystems, particularly in the context of net ecosystem productivity, carbon and water fluxes and their controlling factors, for the past 16 years.A He joined the University of Edinburgh in 1997, and is currently reader. Since his arrival in Edinburgh, he has obtained grants from NERC, the EC, the European Science Foundation, the Scottish Forestry Trust, the Royal Society, the Leverhulme Trust and the Forestry Commission, for a total of about £1.9 million. During the 90s, his group was among the first two to demonstrate the importance of tree size and age in affecting plant physiology. Recently they were the first to use a novel technique to demonstrate that size, not senescence, reduces metabolism in tall trees. Using a novel combination of soil chambers and isotope sampling they demonstrated the impact of soil carbonic anhydrase on the 18O signature of soil CO2 fluxes, a widely used signature in biosphere models. His investigations include empirical and modelling studies of the carbon sequestration by forests, the soil carbon balance and, in particular, the phloem-mediated sugar transfer from tree canopies to the roots. Beside his work on the recovery of ecosystem functions and coastal protection following restoration of mangrove forests in Kenya, he is contributing to the International Polar Year in a multi-institution project aimed at improving understanding of the controls on carbon, water and energy exchange between arctic terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere.
Presentation title: Tall trees in a changing climate: does plasticity in functional traits
matter?
Theme: Structural and Physiological Acclimation of Forest Canopies
Margaret Barbour
Margaret Barbour holds an ARC Future Fellowship in the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Sydney. Her research has focused on plant response to environment in both managed and natural ecosystems. A common thread has been development and application of stable isotopic techniques at scales from cellular to the whole ecosystem. Dr. Barbour received a BSc and MSc from Waikato University (New Zealand), and a PhD from the Australian National University.
Presentation title: New stable isotopic techniques to investigate links between terrestrial carbon and water cycles
Theme: Emerging Technologies and Approaches-the Canopy Processes Toolkit
Professor Roderick Dewar 
Australian National University
Professor Dewar is based at the research school of Biology at the Australian National University and his research interests lie in identifying and applying general organisational principles that govern the behaviour of complex, non-equilibrium systems in biology. The concepts are being applied in plant systems with particular interests in systems behaviour from cellular to regional scales
Presentation title: Optimisation comes of age: new directions in forest modelling
Theme: Emerging Technologies and Approaches-the Canopy Processes Toolkit
Denis Loustau 
French National Agronomical Research Institute (Inra)
Denis Loustau is senior scientist in a French National Agronomical Research Institute (Inra) research unit at Bordeaux (EPHYSE). He has a background in ecology, soil science and plant ecophysiology. His research area concerns the climate and management effects on the forest ecosystem water balance, their biological and environmental controls (including growth, allocation, stomatal control, hydraulic architecture), and the main processes involved: energy balance, plant transpiration, rainfall interception, stomatal regulation, carbon assimilation, respiration and carbon transfer in the soil - plant - atmosphere continuum. He is involved in the main European projects on the carbon and greenhouse gas balances of terrestrial ecosystems (IMECC, GHG-Europe, Carbo-extreme and the infrastructure project ICOS).
Presentation title: Canopy carbon and water exchanges on forest sites with contrasting soil water availability.
Theme: Land and atmosphere exchanges from the leaf to the region
Dr Michael Roderick
Michael Roderick is a Senior Fellow at the ANU and holds joint appointments in the Research School of Earth Sciences and Research School of Biology. He began his professional career as a Land Surveyor and after walking around most of northern Australia for 10 years, he entered academia His research area focuses on the interface between environmental physics and biology. Recent years have been spent examining observed changes in the hydrologic cycle at a variety of scales as well as unravelling the observed worldwide decline in pan evaporation. For that work he was awarded the 2009 Australasian Science Prize.
Presentation title: Water, Forests and Fire
Theme: Land and atmosphere exchanges from the leaf to the region
Dr Belinda Medlyn
Senior Lecturer, Department Of Biological Science, Macquarie University
Belinda's main research interest is in forest ecosystem responses to climate change. She has an undergraduate degree in maths and a PhD in biology. Her research work focuses on trying to bridge the gap between experiments and models: using experimental data to develop evidence-based models of forest responses to climate change.
Presentation title: Reconciling the optimal and empirical models of stomatal conductance
Theme: Emerging Technologies and Approaches-the Canopy Processes Toolkit
Dr Anna Sala
Division of Biological Sciences. The University of Montana, USA
Anna Sala is a professor in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Montana, USA, and adjunct professor of the Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Science of the College of Forestry (also at UM). She received her PhD in Ecology from the University of Barcelona (Spain) in 1992 and did a postdoc at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Anna is broadly interested in plant resource allocation and its implications on plant performance and life history. She has worked in Arctic, Mediterranean, desert and temperate forests. Recent research foci include: a) the interaction of hydraulic, physiological and structural traits in different conifer species and habitats in Northern Rocky Mountain forests; b) the influence of plant internal resource dynamics on plant life history strategies such as masting and prolonged dormancy; c) analysis of the consequences of fire exclusion and active forest management on tree and forest structure and function in mixed ponderosa pine forests. She is currently very interested in the interaction between plant resource allocation (including to storage) and responses to drought.
Presentation title: The carbon-balance approach to tree growth and survival: time to open the box.
Theme: Structural and Physiological Acclimation of Forest Canopies