Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Forests 2020 Young Investigator Award are Dr. Rachael Nolan and Dr. Adriane Esquivel Muelbert.

Dr. Rachael Nolan is a lecturer of fire ecology and biogeosciences at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia. She is fascinated by the role of disturbances in ecosystems, in particular the effects of fire on the landscape. She has two main areas of research. The first is focused on understanding how ecosystems respond to disturbance, and what this means for ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration, habitat values and water resources. The second research area that she focuses on is developing models of forest flammability in relation to dynamics of fuel loads and moisture content.

Dr. Adriane Esquivel Muelbert is a lecturer in Global Forest Ecology at School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. She is interested in global change ecology, particularly of forests. Adriane’s goal is to unravel the implications of global change on biodiversity and forest dynamics and how these will affect forests’ role in the global biogeochemical cycles. Her work leverages large sources of fieldbased data on forest dynamics, functional traits and species composition to answer questions on a continental and global scale. She is passionate about tropical forests and their complexity, particularly the Amazon, and seeks to translate her research into conservation efforts.

Each of them will receive the following:

Prize for Winners:
– An official certificate
– 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs)
– Option to publish two papers, after peer review, in Forests with a 50% discount on the article processing charge.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for their careful evaluation of the many excellent nominations.

Editors-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Timothy A. Martin,
on behalf of Forests 2020 Young Investigator Award Evaluation Committee