Frans-Jan W. Parmentier, Arctic Climate Scientist

I am an ecohydrologist who studies the greenhouse gas exchange of the Arctic-Boreal region. The northernmost part of our planet is warming three times faster than the rest of the world, which is increasing pulse disturbances – such as snow cover loss, droughts, wildfires, and permafrost thaw. My research focuses on how this affects the flow of carbon through ecosystems – its uptake by plants and release from soils – because shifts in this balance have the potential to release greenhouse gases that worsen climate change.

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. In my latest project, "SnowLess" (2025-2028), my team and I combine field measurements and lab experiments to improve the capability of the demographic vegetation model CLM-FATES. The overall goal is to simulate how shrubs and trees are damaged by extreme winter weather – such as frost droughts and rain-on-snow events – and how this affects the exchange of carbon by northern ecosystems.

Besides this research, I am an Associate Editor at the AGU journal JGR: Biogeosciences, and I am a regular columnist in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen. I have also contributed to several expert assessments of AMAP – a working group of the Arctic Council. I was chapter lead on two assessments (2015 and 2021), and a contributing author on two others (see my publications).

In the recent past, I 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.

Before, I 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 a tundra ecosystem in northeast Siberia. For many years I was a researcher at Lund University in Sweden, where I studied how atmospheric warming from sea ice decline affects carbon cycle dynamics across the Arctic. During this time, I regularly did fieldwork in northern Norway, Greenland and Svalbard.