All Speakers

Dr. Marcus Lindner is Principal Scientist in the Resilience Programme at the European Forest Institute. He has over 25 years of experience in research on climate change impacts and the development of response strategies in forest management, forest sector sustainability assessment and biomass resource assessments from European forests. Dr. Lindner currently coordinates the Horizon2020 project RESONATE on resilient forest value chains in Europe. He recently coordinated the Forest Europe Expert Group on Adaptation to Climate Change, led the European Innovation Partnership Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-Agri) Focus Group 24 on Forest Practices and Climate Change and is a current member of the Scientific Advisory Board on Forest Policy of the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Dr. Lindner has extensive experience of working at the science-policy-practice interface and was involved in several policy support studies for the European Commission.

Marc-André Parisien is a research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service, Northern Forestry Centre, (Edmonton, Alberta) where he has been working with the fire research group since 2000. He was trained as a forest ecologist and holds a BSc from McGill University, a MSc from l'Université du Québec à Rimouski, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research on wildland fire is focused on understanding biophysical controls on fire regimes, mostly within the boreal biome of North America. He specializes in quantitative analysis methods, including process-based simulation modeling, a tool he uses for mapping wildfire risk. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and his work has been featured in the scientific and popular media.

Jean-Noel Candau is a quantitative ecologist at the Canadian Forest Service in Sault-Ste-Marie (Ontario). He develops and applies statistical and computer simulation approaches to study the large-scale spatio-temporal dynamics of forest insects and their interactions with other disturbances and climate change

Jean-Noel has been with the Canadian Forest Service since 2008. Prior to that he was a EU Marie-Curie Research Fellow and research scientist at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Avignon (France), a research scientist at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and NSERC research fellow at the Canadian Forest Service.

Heli Peltola is a Professor of Silvicultural Sciences at the Faculty of Science and Forestry, University of Eastern Finland. Her research focus is on sustainable management of boreal forests for multiple ecosystem services, considering the changing operating environment, risks and uncertainty, and the need to adapt to, and mitigate, climate change.  She has expertise in mechanistic wind damage risk and process-based forest ecosystem modelling. She obtained in 1995 a Ph.D. in Silvicultural Sciences from the University of Joensuu, Finland. She has participated in many national and international research collaboration projects, and she has also extensive experience in leadership of research projects. She is an author of over 200 scientific peer-review publications. She has so far supervised 28 PhD theses and 88 90 M.Sc. theses.

Peltola is a member of the Finnish Climate Change Panel (2020-2023). Sher was in 2019-2021 a member of the Research Council for Biosciences, Health, and the Environment at the Academy of Finland. Peltola was awarded with the decoration Knight First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland by the President of the Republic of Finland in 2020, and with the Carola and Carl-Olof Ternryd's award by the Linnaeus Academy's Research Foundation in 2020.

Epidemiologist on French ESV Platform (Platform for epidemiological surveillance in plant health)

I take part in the scientific and health expertise through international health monitoring using global monitoring, alert of knowledge or events from a wide range of official, informal and scientific sources (coupling text mining and expert information) to produce synthesis and interpretation of sanitary news and alerts.

I participate in the processing and analysis of data: from centralization of monitoring data, data quality, assessment of risk area to evaluation of monitoring system. I am directly involved (or in support) of pine wood nematode, Bretziella fagacearum and pine processionary requirement from decision-makers.

Frédéric DELPORT is Head of the Forest Health Department (DSF) at the Ministry of Agriculture in France. The DSF monitors the health of French forests through more than 250 forest health correspondent-observers, field foresters, mainly from the ONF (national forests office, in charge of public forests management), the CNPF (national center for forests properties, in charge of accompanying private foresters) and the State forestry services. He previously worked for more than 10 years at the ONF, as head of the Versailles Agency for the management of peri-urban forests in western Paris and at the head office of the Establishment.

Louise Eriksson is a docent in psychology and work as a researcher in environmental psychology. Her research focuses on understanding individuals’ and groups’ attitudes and behaviors within socio-ecological systems. Several of her research projects examine forest actors, and she has among other things studied how private forest owners perceive the risk of forest damages and how they adapt their forest to climate change.

Jonathan Boucher is a wildland fire research scientist for the Canadian Forest Service (CFS), based at the Laurentian Forestry Centre in Quebec city. His research program focuses on developing science that supports wildfire management activities (e.g., fire behaviour, suppression resources productivity and effectiveness, forecast of fire suppression workload). At the national level, he is involved in the Users and Science Team of WildFireSat, he is a member of the Science Committee of the Forest Mapping for Wildfire Resilience program, and also part of the Fire Danger Group working at developing the Next-Generation Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (NG-CFFDRS). In this context, he is working on standards for measuring forest fuel attributes, including defining metrics from Terrestrial LiDAR Scanner (TLS). He leads the Firehawk project, a web-based rapid risk evaluator for wildfires in Canada. Prior joining CFS in 2019, Jonathan worked for SOPFEU (Quebec’s fire management agency) during five fire seasons, where he was Science and Performance Coordinator, and part of incident management teams (IMT). Jonathan has a Ph.D. in Forest Science from Laval University, where he studied burn severity and post-fire ecology in the context of salvage logging. He is also a certified forester in the province of Quebec.

Rasoul Yousefpour studies forest decision processes to find the most desirable forest management strategies.  His recent research has been focused on finding robust and adaptive solutions to deal with the risk and uncertainty of forest management under climate change.

Christophe Orazio is a forestry engineer who, after having worked in a large number of national organizations in forest management and research, in mainland France and overseas, has dedicated himself for 20 years to scientific and technical cooperation on the theme of sustainable management of cultivated forests. He has set up and participated in numerous projects to facilitate decision-making in the forest in relation to many ecological and socio-economic dimensions of forest management. He has been involved in numerous projects on resilience and integrated forest management (FORRISk, PLURIFOR, FIRE-RES, ...) , he coordinates the REINFFORCE infrastructure on climate change adaptation. It coordinates an IUFRO task force (a transdisciplinary and international group) entitled "Resilient planted forests to serve society and the bioeconomy". He is currently Director of the European Institute of Cultivated Forests, a multi-actors network aiming to facilitate exchanges between science and society.

François Pimont is a 43-year-old engineer-in-chief, working at INRAe URFM in Avignon on wildfires. He is interested in physics-based fire behavior modelling, as well as in the probablilistic modelling of regional fire activities in the context of climate change. He also contributes to fuel structure measurement through LiDAR and to the prediction of fuel moisture response to drought. François Pimont is expert for the French Ministry of Agriculture and is involved in several groups helping public-decision making and research programs, such as the H2020 Fire-RES program. 

The Office of the Chief Forester of Quebec (OCFQ) is responsible for the determination of annual allowable cut (AAC) for all forest management units in Quebec (roughly 425,000 km2 of forest). At the OCFQ, Stephen is responsible for the integration of natural disturbance and climate change to AAC determination. His work principally involves knowledge brokering, predictive modelling, and decision support.  

Philippe Deuffic is a French environmental sociologist at INRAE. He works on the social construction of environmental problems such as adaptation to climate change and risks. He was responsible for the working package on attitude of forest owners towards forest dieback in the Belmont Forum project CLIMTREE (France, Germany, China) and towards windstorm in the Windrisk project (Ireland)

Maya Gonzales is doctor in ecology on the diversity of woody species in fragmented farmland forests. As a lecturer in ecology in the Bordeaux SciencesAgro, she teaches general ecology, biodiversity forestry, and dendrology. Her current research also focuses on the application of global risk analysis to environmental issues such as forest management and biological invasion.

Sébastien Delmotte is an expert in statistics applied to risk management. With more than 15 years of experience in consulting and training in the industrial fields (agri-food, aeronautics, space, defence) and health, he is responsible for teaching risk management and safety courses at CentraleSupelec Exed, EUROSAE and ENAC.

Richard is an Assistant Professor of Forest Health working at the nexus of biological tree mortality, wildfire, and forest management. He uses analysis at the stand-to-landscape extent to quantify changes in forest structure and composition in response to these disturbances and in light of ongoing climate change. His work is focused on California and western North American and often addresses the invasive pathogen Phytophthora ramorum along with native root diseases and bark beetles.

Barry Gardiner is a senior researcher at the Institut Européen de la Forêt Cultivée (IEFC) in France, a researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany and an honorary research fellow at Forest Research in Scotland. He has a particular interest in different abiotic risks to forests. His research focus has been primarily on wind and snow damage to forests, and he developed a forest wind/snow risk model that has been adapted for use in many countries. From 1987 to 2011 he worked at Forest Research in Scotland on wind risk to forests and the influence of forest management on timber quality. From 2011 to 2015 he worked as a Senior Scientist at INRA Bordeaux on a 4-year scientific package entitled “Wind Damage to Forests in a Changing Climate: Impacts and Mitigation” and from 2016 to 2019 he worked as a senior researcher at the EFI Planted Forests Facility. He currently is working on various projects focused on multiple risks to forests and how to incorporate risk management into forest management practice. He is Associate Editor of Annals of Forest Science and Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, and Coordinator of IUFRO Group 8.03.06 “Impact of wind on forests”. He is an author on more than 100 scientific papers and has edited 3 books. He was awarded Docteur Honoris Causa de l’Université Laval de Québec in June 2016.

Guillaume Moreau is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, Canada. He was trained as a forest engineer and hold a PhD in Forest Sciences from Laval University, Canada. His research mainly focuses on understanding forest dynamics to develop adapted silvicultural systems promoting forest productivity and resilience in the context of global change. He is particularly interested in growth and mortality dynamics and how tree vigour evolves over time. Using dendrochronological approaches, his research also focuses on the identification of the key climatic variables that alter tree growth. He is teaching silviculture at Laval University and member of the Science Integration Committee for the Canadian research program Silva21. 

Frédéric BERGER (male) is a senior researcher (Forestry Master Engineering Degrees, M.Sc. degree in Forestry and Biology Sciences, PhD thesis in Forestry and Geomatic Sciences). He is working, in INRAE since 1997, on sustainable valorization of forest-based solutions in integrated risk management, and expert assessment processes. He has developed specific researches on rockfalls risks (assessment, 3D modeling, trees mechanical behavior modeling) and terrain/forest stands characterization using aerial laser scanning (LiDAR). He is involved in applied researches dealing with Decision Support Systems for risk assessment and protective forests management. His disciplinary fields concern forestry, remote sensing, and rockfalls modeling. He has managed during 10 years the research team PEER that he created in 2010 (Protection, Ecological Engineering, and Restoration). Since January 1, 2020, he is the head of the new research and technical team COMPET. This new team has objective to promote the expertise, technological and logistical competences of the LESSEM. He is also an international expert on rockfalls zoning and protection forest management. He has authored 72 scientific articles, 30 technical articles, 11 book chapters, 14 models/databases, 8 educational products and 112 conference papers (Google scholar Hindex: 24).

Hervé Jactel is an entomologist and forest ecologist. His main research interests are in biodiversity and forest ecosystem functioning, with a focus on insect herbivory regulation and integrated forest pest management. He develops methods for forest risk analysis, studying the effects of global change on biotic hazard occurrence, forest susceptibility and the socio-economic impact of damage. He uses a combination of approaches, ranging from long-term ecological studies to meta-analyses and multi-criteria decision tools.