People

Markku is a forester educated at the University of Helsinki, with a postdoctoral fellowship completed at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Before returning to Helsinki, he served as a research professor at Peking University. He has lived on five continents and built a diverse career across academia, national research institutes, an international NGO, and a private consultancy. His research spans a wide range of topics, including tree structure, natural disturbances, land use, and ecosystem carbon dynamics.

Markku is responsible for the following courses:

• Master´s thesis seminar
• Metsän kasvu ja kasvatus
• Restoration of degraded ecosystems: theory and practice
• Simulation of forest growth
• Struktur, mångfald och användning av skogar i Norden
• Trees, forests and people

Selected publications

• Trees and Forests of the World: Why They Matter to Us. 2026. Oxford University Press (monograph)
• What would a tree say about its size? 2021. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
• Trees and shrubs differ biomechanically. 2015. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
• Temperature explains global variation in old-growth forest biomass. 2012. Global Ecology and Biogeography.
• Maintenance cost, toppling risk and size of trees in a self-thinning stand. 2010. Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Titta Has expertise in remote sensing of vegetation (boreal forest canopy and understory, LAI, fPAR, phenology, spectra), forest classification and mapping (biodiversity, species, structure), and forest (dynamics) modelling (Formit-M, EFDM, Yasso).

Forest wind disturbances remain inconsistently mapped and poorly understood at the global scale. Wen aims to create a global map of forest wind disturbances using over 20 years of satellite imagery, analyzing sudden decreases in Leaf Area Index to detect disturbances and coupling them with wind data. This will provide detailed insights into the patterns, frequency, and severity of wind disturbance events, helping us better understand forest resilience under climate change. 

Rapid anthropogenic climate change is resulting in shifting species distributions and has the potential to disrupt long-term ecological associations and biodiversity patterns. Noah's master's thesis research looks to model the relative shifts of European tree species under different climate change scenarios, and how this may impact tree species assemblages and therefore the distribution of forest types in Europe.

Finland's forests hold significant ecological, social, recreational, and economic values; however, their conservation and management involve complex trade-offs between these activities under changing climatic scenarios. Urmila's master's thesis explores university students' attitudes towards forest conservation and management practices in Finland. Moreover, this study focuses on how various demographic variables, such as gender, age, faculty, family forest ownership, and frequency of forest visits, shape attitudes towards forest use and conservation.