Annikki Mäkelä is professor in silviculture at the Department of Forest Sciences. Her research field is forest carbon cycling and production ecology. For her basic degree she studied systems theory and did her PhD in forestry. Her special interests are in understanding how trees capture resources and how they allocate them to form a spectrum of structures that appear so well adapted to the prevailing environment. Her work deals with developing theories and models of tree function, structure, and growth, and the application of these to questions relevant to forest management under changing environmental conditions and alternative management objectives.
Che Liu is a doctoral student focussing on the age/size-related effects on tree hydraulics. At the current position, he has been studying mechanistic models on stomatal behaviour, hydraulic system in the tree trunk and related ecophysiological properties on difference spatial and temporal scales.
Anu Akujärvi collaborates with the Forest Modelling Group and works as a researcher at Finnish Environment Institute SYKE. She has a doctoral degree in physical geography and a master’s degree in forest ecology from University of Helsinki. Her main tasks in this group are quantifying and modelling the growth and carbon balance of old-growth forests. She is also investigating the impacts of climate change on boreal forests and their adaptation options through alternative forest management strategies.
Joanna Simms is a Research Assistant at the University of Helsinki's Forest Science Department. She is currently studying Operations Research at Aalto University with a minor in Forests and Climate Change at the University of Helsinki. Joanna is working on the seasonal behaviour of photosynthesis within the SPP and PRELES models.
Xianglin Tian is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Forest Sciences. His research field is forest growth modelling with empirical and mechanistic approaches. He has work experience in the calibration of the forest models PRELES and CROBAS for various forest types, climate conditions, and tree species.
Man Hu is a PhD student at the University of Helsinki, Department of Forest Science. She received her M.Sc in Forest Management in 2017 from Beijing Forestry University. Her PhD project is to combine process-based models with TLS data for forest management planning under climate change. Currently, she is working in the PREBAS model development with special interests in old and multi-layered stands.
Pauliina Schiestl-Aalto has a background in forest sciences and ecophysiology. She is mainly interested in process modelling of tree growth and carbon use. and she has been working with for example CASSIA growth model. Currently she is the coordinator of SMEARII station in Hyytiälä.
Francesco Minunno is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Forest Sciences. His background is in Forest sciences and his research field is forest modelling. Since his PhD he applied modern computational techniques (e.g., Bayesian statistics, data assimilation, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis) to forest modelling. The major contribution of his research has been in integrating data and models in order to refine model predictions and reduce model forecast uncertainties. His work also focuses on forest model applications to evaluate the impact of alternative management prescriptions under changing environmental conditions.
Lauri Lindfors is a postdoctoral researcher, with the background of forest sciences and ecophysiology. He is currently working in the development of the PREBAS model. This work aims to increase the temporal resolution of the model with a new module from one year to one month. This work involves also validation of the module against field measurements conducted at Smear 2 station. Lauri Lindfors also serves as the webmaster for the web pages of the Forest Modelling group.
Atte Kumpu is a PhD student in the department of Forest Sciences at the University of Helsinki. M.Sc. in Agriculture and forestry in 2015, majored in Forest Ecology. His PhD work focuses on uneven-aged structured forests and includes soil carbon stock and soil respiration, biomass distribution within uneven-aged stands and the related modelling. He is currently working with model testing with PipeQual, to test its suitability for uneven-aged structured forests.