Frans-Jan W. Parmentier, Arctic Climate Scientist

Dr. Frans-Jan W. Parmentier
Senior Researcher in Ecohydrology
Centre for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene
Department of Geosciences
University of Oslo, Norway
Postboks 1022 Blindern
0315 Oslo, Norway
Research Interests
I am an ecohydrologist who studies the impact of climate change on the Arctic-Boreal region. The northernmost part of our planet is warming much faster than the rest of the world, which is increasing disturbances – such as droughts, snow cover loss, and permafrost thaw. My research focuses on how this affects the uptake of carbon by plants, and its release from soils, potentially triggering a release of greenhouse gases that can act as a feedback on the global climate system.
In my work, I draw from my broad experience in the field, from Svalbard to northeast Siberia, to derive new insights from satellite data and to advance model development. At present, I leverage this expertise as the PI of "SnowLess" (2025-2028), funded by the Research Council of Norway. By combining field measurements and lab experiments, we will improve the capability of the demographic vegetation model CLM-FATES to simulate how shrubs and trees are damaged by extreme winter weather – such as frost droughts and rain-on-snow events.
In addition, I am a contributor to expert assessments from AMAP – a working group of the Arctic Council. I was a lead author on two reports, heading chapters on natural methane emissions in their 2015 and 2021 assessments, and I was a contributing author on two others (SWIPA 2017 and Key Trends and Impacts 2021). Furthermore, I am a regular columnist in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen, and I'm an Associate Editor at JGR: Biogeosciences.
Adventdalen on Svalbard, one of my fieldwork areas. The cottongrass (Eriophorum scheuchzeri) pictured in the foreground is found in wet areas and plays an important role in the emission of the potent greenhouse gas methane.
Past Research Experience
For the past couple of years, I have led the Norwegian-Swedish research project WINTERPROOF where my PhD students improved the representation of snow dynamics, plant hydraulics and soil biogeochemistry in the models CLM-FATES and LPJ-GUESS. This project significantly reduced the uncertainty in model projections of arctic carbon-climate feedbacks.
I have worked at research institutes across Scandinavia and in the Netherlands: I received my PhD in 2011 from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for my dissertation on the drivers of greenhouse gas exchange from arctic tundra. I did my postdoc at Lund University in Sweden, where I studied how atmospheric warming from sea ice decline affects carbon cycle dynamics across the Arctic.
In 2016, I led a research project at the Norwegian Research Institute Nibio focusing on the carbon dynamics of a Norwegian peatland, which was followed by a research stay at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. From 2018 to 2023, I had a shared research position between Lund University and the University of Oslo, while leading the WINTERPROOF project. After the conclusion of this project, I continued full time at the University of Oslo as a senior researcher.