ProfessorColin Prentice, FRS

My research centres on understanding how plants react to and interact with changes in climate and other aspects of the physical environment. My strategy is to integrate process understanding in ecology and environmental physics with observations of all kinds, including atmospheric measurements and remote sensing, with a view to developing new theoretical and predictive frameworks. I engage in a variety of applications of this science including analysis of the impacts of contemporary climate change on ecosystems and ecosystem services, and of the various feedbacks between the biosphere and climate which have operated on long time scales and which are being activated today by global environmental change.

Recognizing that the development of so-called state-of-the-art models for large-scale processes in the terrestrial biosphere are foundering due to their ever-increasing complexity and lack of agreed theoretical foundations, my top research priority is now the development of a 'next generation' dynamic global vegetation model based on eco-evolutionary optimality principles. Optimality principles are the 'missing law' of biology for Earth System modelling. They have the potential to generate substantially simpler and more robust models that fully exploit the power of natural selection to eliminate suboptimal trait combinations, and the richness of relevant observational data that are now available to ecosystem scientists for the development and evaluation of theory and models.

This is the basis for the REALM project I lead: Reinventing Ecosystem and Land-surface Models. This project is funded for six years by the European Research Council and aims to revolutionize the way numerical models are developed for the land biosphere and its interactions with the changing climate. I am the science strategy lead for a large international project funded by Schmidt Sciences (formerly Schmidt Futures) called Land Ecosystem Models based On New Theory, obseRvations, and ExperimEnts (LEMONTREE). Continuing the same general theme as REALM, LEMONTREE is developing a develop a next-generation model of the terrestrial biosphere and its interactions with the carbon cycle, water cycle and climate, drawing on eco-evolutionary optimality theory as a basis for building ecosystem models.

I am Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society which launched in 2019. This is a collaborative project with experts from Kings College London, The University of Reading and Royal Holloway University of London. This centre is the only research organization in the world devoted to fundamental research on the biophysical dynamics of wildfire and its human dimensions.

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

PhD in Botany, Cambridge University (1977)
BA in Natural Sciences, Cambridge University (1973)

SENIOR POSITIONS HELD

Professor of Biosphere and Climate Impacts, Imperial College London (continuing)
Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society (2019-2026)
Distinguished Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University (2022-2025)
Honorary Professor in Ecology and Evolution, Macquarie University (2018-2023);
AXA Chair of Biosphere and Climate Impacts, Imperial College London (2013-2019)
Professor in Ecology and Evolution, Macquarie University (2009-2016)
Professor of Biosphere-Climate Interactions, Imperial College London (2010-2013)
Professor of Earth System Science, University of Bristol, and NERC Research Programme Leader, Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System (2003-2010)
Founding Director, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena (1997-2003)
Professor of Plant Ecology, Lund University (1991-1998)

Research Group
website: http://prenticeclimategroup.wordpress.com/

Postdoctoral researchers

Dr Keith Bloomfield
Dr Ning Dong
Dr Catherine Morfopoulos
Dr Ramesh Ningthoujam
Dr David Orme
Dr David Sandoval
Dr Dharma Sapkota

research coordinator (LEMONTREE)

Dr Sarah Jones

centre manager (Leverhulme Centre)

Dr Adriana Ford

Academic visitors

Dr Mengdi Gao

PhD Students

Wenjia Cai
Riujie Ding
Olivia Haas
Jiaze Li
Giulia Mengoli
Hannah O’Sullivan
Alison Prior
Boya Zhou