Julien Vollering's disputation: Forecasting the continued naturalization of wildly planted alien conifers
Julien Vollering defended his PhD thesis on January 17th. After a trial lecture about ecosystem response to climate change, the main defence was about forecasting the continued naturalization of wildly planted Sitka spruce in Norway.
Julien pointing out Sitka spruce in the landscape
Sitka spruce is among the many species that spread outside areas they are planted, and a key aim of the thesis is to evaluate the nature of this spread: do sitkas spread rapidly or slowly, and which ecosystems could they establish in?
Julien Vollering's thesis presents an R package (MIAmaxent) that can be used to understand the ecology in the Sitka native range and forecast spread from these relationships, as well as a method to handle spatial bias in occurrence data. He also quantifies spread into differently-exposed ecosystems, and identifies bottlenecks to potential further spread.
Julien Vollering has been co-supervised by the NHM and Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.
The event was held as a physical-digital hybrid.
