Cramer CV

Keynote Presentations from the 1st ALTER-Net Summer School, Peyresq 27 August - 8 September 2006

Biosketch

Wolfgang Cramer is Professor of Global Ecology at the Institute of Geoecology at Potsdam University and has been, since the beginning of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in 1993, head of its "Global Change and Natural Systems" department. A geographer by training (Diploma from the Justus-Liebig Universität in Gießen, Germany) he received his PhD from Uppsala University, Sweden, on vegetation science. His postdoctoral research had first been carried out at Uppsala University before he became an associate professor at Trondheim University, Norway. During his time in Trondheim he also was research scholar on sustainable development of the biosphere at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Before  moving to Potsdam he was appointed Brundtland-Professor for "Energy,  Environment and Society" at the Center for Environment and Development at Trondheim  University.

During the last 15 years, most of his work was related to the development and use of suitable modelling techniques for the assessment of broad-scale biospheric responses to changes in climate and atmospheric CO₂ concentration. He was a member of the group which developed the most widely used terrestrial biogeography model, BIOME 1. His current research group at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research develops assessment tools for global change impacts on the terrestrial biosphere (dynamic global vegetation models), water resources (catchment and basin scale models of water availability and quality), forests (dynamics of natural and managed forests) and agricultural crops (mechanistic model of cereal growth and phenology). Wolfgang still shares some responsibility with Wolfgang Lucht (now the main group leader) and several associated groups at other institutes to further developing the Lund-Potsdam-Jena Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (LPJ-DGVM).

Wolfgang Cramer's interest is now encompassing questions of global vulnerability to climate change. Wolfgang Cramer has published widely, including 89 papers in refereed journals and books. He contributed as a Lead Author to the Second (1995) as well as the Third (2001) Assessment Report to IPCC, and to the Special Report "Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry" (2000). For the ongoing Fourth IPCC report, he serves as review editor. He also wrote parts of two volumes of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal "Regional Environmental Change" and on the editorial board of many other journals.