Following Photons Through Forests

Prof. Dr. Michael Leuchner has been University Professor for Physical Geography and Climatology at RWTH Aachen University's Department of Geography since 2019. He was previously a Publishing Editor for Earth Sciences, Geography and Environment at Springer Nature from 2015 to 2019, a Fill-In Professor for Ecoclimatology at the Technical University of Munich from 2013 to 2015, a Fill-In Professor for Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Research Scientist at the Professorship for Ecoclimatology of the Technical University of Munich, and a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scientist at the University of Houston.

He completed his Habilitation in Atmospheric Environmental Research at the Technical University of Munich in 2018 with the topic Detection and Modeling of Abiotic Environmental Factors at the Interfaces of Atmosphere, Biosphere and Anthroposphere under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Annette Menzel.

Jeannine Cavender-Bares is the John Fisher and Jennifer Caldwell Professor of Climate, Environment, and Sustainability in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard University Herbaria (2024-present). She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior at the University of Minnesota, where she served on the faculty from 2003 to 2024. Cavender-Bares grew up in Athens, Ohio in the diverse, mixed-deciduous forests of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and spent many childhood summers camping in natural areas across North America. She received her B.A. in environmental sciences from Cornell University in 1990, her masters in forestry and global change from Yale University in 1992, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000, where she studied the physiological and evolutionary ecology of oaks (Quercus).

Barbara Demmig-Adams is a professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She received her undergraduate (1979) and graduate (1984) degrees at the Universität Würzburg, Germany, in plant physiology (department headed by Ulrich Heber) and then spent two years (1984-1986) as a postdoctoral research associate at the Plant Biology Department of the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford working with Olle Björkman on chlorophyll fluorescence signatures in mangroves and other evergreens. She then returned to Würzburg (to the department of plant ecology headed by Otto Lange) to work with Klaus Winter and received her Habilitation in 1989 on the topic of photoprotection and xanthophylls. She moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder with her husband and colleague William Adams in 1989 and has been a professor there since 1990.

Hideki Kobayashi is a senior researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and an affiliated research professor at the International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks. He received his bachelor's degree in Physics from the Tokyo University of Science, and his master's and Ph.D. degrees in Environmental Science (Remote Sensing) from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Institute of Science Tokyo). His doctoral research focused on evaluating the impacts of ENSO events and forest fires on the carbon balance of vegetation in Southeast Asia using satellite remote sensing data. His research integrates radiative transfer modeling, satellite remote sensing, and field observations to understand biosphere-atmosphere interactions. After joining JAMSTEC, he developed a three-dimensional plant canopy radiative transfer model. From 2008 to 2010, he was a postdoctoral researcher under the mentorship of Professor Dennis Baldocchi at the University of California, Berkeley.