Frans-Jan W. Parmentier, Associate Professor in Geobiosphere Science

I am an ecohydrologist who studies the interaction between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. I am particularly interested in how the amplified warming and changing hydrology of the Arctic-Boreal region affects the greenhouse gas exchange of ecosystems, including the carbon loss from permafrost thaw. In my research, I draw from a long experience in studying northern ecosystems in areas such as northeast Siberia, Greenland, Scandinavia and Svalbard. I use this broad field experience to derive new insights from satellite data and to advance model development.

I'm currently leading the Norwegian-Swedish research project WINTERPROOF (2018-2022) where we improve the representation of snow, plant hydraulics and soil biogeochemistry in the models CLM-FATES and LPJ-GUESS. The overal goal is to reduce the uncertainty in model projections of arctic climate feedbacks. In this project, funded by the research councils of both Norway and Sweden, I supervise two PhD students and we collaborate with several institutes across Scandinavia.

In addition, I contribute to expert assessments of AMAP, a working group of the Arctic Council. I coordinated a chapter on the 2015 report on methane and I'm a lead author on the SWIPA 2017 assessment. Also, I regularly write columns about climate change for the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen.

Over the years, I have worked at several research institutes in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. I received my PhD in 2011 from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands for my dissertation on the drivers of greenhouse gas exchange from tundra ecosystems. As part of my research, I frequently traveled to the Kytalyk nature reserve in northeast Siberia to do fieldwork. I continued as a postdoc at Lund University in Sweden, where I studied connections between the arctic carbon cycle and sea ice decline – since the latter plays an important role in the amplified warming of the region.

In 2016, I led a research project at the Norwegian Research Institute Nibio, to investigate how an extreme frost drought affected the CO2 uptake of a subarctic peatland. This project was followed by a research stay at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. Since 2018, I have a research position that I share 50/50 between Lund University and the University of Oslo – funded by the Young Research Talent grant and Starting Grant that I received from the Norwegian and Swedish research councils, respectively.