University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge team is lead by Ulf Büntgen.
Background
Since January 2017, Büntgen holds the Chair of Environmental Systems Analysis at the Department of Geography, where he also established Cambridge’s first Tree-Ring Unit (TRU) and became Director of the new MPhil program on Holocene Climates. Büntgen frequently shifts and crosses the disciplinary boundaries between archaeology, climatology, ecology and history. He therefore employs a wide range of scientific sub-disciplines, including paleoclimatology, global change ecology, dendrochronology and mycology. Büntgen is particularly interested in understanding the direct and indirect effects of climate variability on various, interacting environmental and societal systems across different spatiotemporal scales. In his conceptual, intellectual, and methodological approaches, he aims to provide quantitative answers to topical questions of both academic and public concern. Büntgen and his colleagues at the TRU, together with an international network ofcollaborators, will improve existing and develop new annually resolved and absolutely dated tree-ring chronologies and wood anatomical indices.
Introducing the infrastructure
Research in the Department of Geography covers a broad range of topics, approaches, and sites of study. Our expertise is both conceptual and applied and our goals both 'blue sky' and policy oriented. Excellence comes from sustained specialisation, emergent exploration, and interdisciplinary collaboration both within and beyond the Department. The Climate and Environmental group conducts research on past, present and future climate and environmental variability. Understanding the mechanisms, evolution and impacts of global climate and environmental systems is central to the research of members of the Climate and Environment Dynamics Research Group. Their research explores how different components of the Earth's system respond to, and modulate, climatic changes at various spatiotemporal scales. A wide range of local to global proxy data, as well as physical and biological models, is employed to illuminate processes acting within and between the earth's atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere and cryosphere. Among others, sedimentary and volcanic archives, tree-rings, historical sources and paleoclimate models, are compiled and analysed to enhance our understanding of how past natural and anthropogenic climate variability has shaped our planet, and human history. Modern day environments, ecosystems and atmospheric processes are studied using both observational and modelling techniques, which allow us to understand the implications of long-term human-environment interactions and improve predictions of future climate change. The research of members of the Biogeography and Biogeomorphology Group is concerned with the interactions and feedbacks between organisms (including humans) and their environments in the past, present and uncertain future. While biogeography focuses on the environmental, physiological and ecological constraints to the dispersal of organisms from local to regional and global scales, biogeomorphology focuses on the direct and indirect influences of organisms on earth surface processes, as well as the role of geomorphology in ecosystem functioning and resilience.