OCTF seminar followed by drinks, all welcome, booking required

Intact tropical forests captured 15% of our carbon dioxide emissions over the early 2000s, storing it in wood and other forms of biomass. However, the capacity of Amazonian forests to capture excess carbon from the atmosphere is waning. In this seminar, Dr Wannes Hubau will show how the African tropical forest ‘carbon sink’ is evolving and whether we have pushed ‘The Lungs of our Planet’ to their very limits.

Dr Wannes Hubau (°1985) explores tropical African vegetation responses to climate change at several timescales, combining repeated forest inventory data from permanent plots (spanning decades), growth-ring research (centuries) and fossil charcoal analysis (millennia). He obtained his PhD at Ghent University in 2013 and conducted post-doctoral research at Leeds University, the Wood Biology Service of the AfricaMuseum and Ghent University. He led numerous field expeditions in four African countries (Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, D.R.Congo).