dr. M (Milena) Holmgren Urba

I study the mechanisms that explain the resilience of terrestrial ecosystems to climate variability and disturbances and the implications for ecosystem functioning and ecological services. I am interested in how ecological and social dynamics interact and how ecological scientific work can be disseminated through and used by decision-makers for conservation and ecological restoration purposes. My work is profoundly cooperative and combines conceptual models, experiments, remote sensing and field studies. My empirical work has covered a wide range of ecosystems including drylands, boreal, temperate and tropical ecosystems from North and South America, West and South Africa, North and Mediterranean Europe, and China.

Research lines and current PhD candidates:

1) Abrupt transitions in terrestrial ecosystems

• Ronny Rotbarth: Adaptive Resilience of Boreal Forests to Disturbances 
• Yanning Li: Greening the Desert: What Can We Learn from the Chinese Dryland Restoration Projects?  
• Jing Li. Assessing the Resilience of Boreal Ecosystems to Climate Change

2) Linking aquatic and terrestrial ecology

• Arnold Lugo: The Role of Aquatic -Terrestrial Coupling on the Resilience of Amazonian Floodplain Forests to Fire
• Annemieke Drost: Resilience of European Wetlands
• Daniil Scheifes: A Safe Operating Space for European Wetlands
• Ana Lia Ciganda: Coastal Cyanobacterial Toxic Blooms in a Warmer World: addressing the challenges from a socio-ecological perspective
• Guillermo Sena: Determining Optimal Riparian Buffer Zones in Uruguay: Integrating Ecological and Socio-Economic Criteria

3) Novel strategies for climate change adaptation

• Carolina Balian: Accounting for Environmental Footprints of Cattle Production

4) Ecological legacies of extreme climate events