TUESDAY 16 DECEMBER 2025
TIME 3-5 pm
LOCATION Aula Seminari DIEF S.Marta
ASSESSING THE CLIMATE IMPACTS OF LAND COVER CHANGE UNDER PRESENT AND FUTURE ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS
Alessandro Cescatti Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
Joint Research Centre of the European Commission Changes in land cover affect surface properties and, therefore, influence the direction and magnitude of energy, water and carbon fluxes between the atmosphere and land. This ultimately impacts the local and global climate. The processes underlying biophysical and biogeochemical vegetation properties depend on the background climate and are therefore affected by climate change in a complex, circular manner. For this reason, improving our understanding of ongoing changes in the land-climate nexus is paramount to developing land based climate mitigation strategies and policies. Due to the inherent complexities of land-climate systems, simulations performed using land-atmosphere coupled models have proven rather uncertain and are strongly affected by knowledge gaps, weak assumptions, and oversimplified parameterisation. Conversely, disentangling the signals of the different processes from Earth observations is particularly challenging and can lead to uncertain attribution of causality. Even more challenging is using experimental signals derived under present climate conditions to project the future direction and magnitude of the biophysical and biogeochemical impacts of land cover change on the climate. Given the importance of this research topic in the fight against climate warming, new approaches and methodological advances are required to benefit from the increasing computational capacity and expanding Earth observations. In this presentation, I will review recent progress in data-driven and hybrid analyses and report on current attempts to investigate the impact of land transformation on the future climate trajectory.
Alessandro Cescatti
Senior scientist and group leader at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. His scientific activity is based on the integration of Earth observations and models to assess bi-directional land-climate interactions under current and future conditions. He focuses on the quantification of biophysical and biogeochemical processes that occur in the land-climate system at various spatial and temporal scales. In recent years, he has used data model integration to produce evidence-based assessments in support of European forest-related policies and strategies.
UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF BIODIVERSITY IN THE BIOSPHERE-ATMOSPHERE INTERACTIONS
Mirco Migliavacca Joint Research Centre of the European Commission
Vegetation biodiversity plays a key role in determining the functioning of ecosystems and their response to climate change. For this reason is at the centre of several European and international policy initiatives. However, there are still gaps in biodiversity research that prevent us from fully understanding its role in shaping interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere. The seminar will explore these research gaps, examining which facets of biodiversity are most important for ecosystem functioning, how biodiversity can be measured across different scales and sensors, and how it influences carbon and energy exchange between land and atmosphere, as well as its response to climate extremes.
Mirco Migliavacca
Environmental scientist, he received a Ph.D. in Environmental Science in 2009 at the University of Milano-Bicocca, then he worked as a Grant Holder at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, and afterward, worked as a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. Currently, he is Scientific Officer at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in the Bioeconomy and Forest Unit. His research interest is oriented toward answering broad questions in the field of global change ecology, biometeorology, and biogeochemistry related to carbon and water cycle in terrestrial ecosystems and interactions between climate and biosphere. He uses tools from data mining and modeling combined with several data streams from ground and earth observations. The main scientific research lines are: 1) understanding how the interaction of biogeochemical cycles (Carbon Water-Nutrient) shapes biosphere-atmosphere interaction; 2) Understanding the drivers of the phenology of functions and structure of terrestrial ecosystems using modeling, experiments, and remote sensing data; 3) explore the potential of novel remote sensing information for tracking ecosystem functioning and biodiversity at a variety of scales; 4) understanding how CO2, water and energy fluxes are controlled by biodiversity and biological properties of ecosystems, besides climate. He is now actively working on the new European observatory for deforestation, forest degradation and associated drivers, and more broadly on the scientific support to EU policy in the field of sustainable resources and climate change.