17 October 2012

Yadvinder Malhi wins European Research Council Grant

Yadvinder Malhi, who leads the ECI's Ecosystems Research Programme, has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Research Grant.

The focus of the project, called GEM-TRAIT, is to understand the role that  tree diversity plays in the response of tropical forests to climate change. The grant award is 2.5 million euros over five years.

The project involves collecting novel field data on leaf form and ecosystem function from study sites in forests in six countries (Peru, Brazil, Bolivia, Ghana, Gabon, Malaysia). These countries are all part of the Global Ecosystems Monitoring (GEM) network set up by Professor Malhi. The field data will be coupled with new theoretical tools to scale from leaves to trees to forests. It will potentially lead to a fresh approach to representing ecosystems in global climate change models.