Board Member
Prof. Dr. Rik Leemans heads the Environmental Systems Analysis group (www.esa.wur.nl) of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, directs the WIMEK graduate school, and chairs the Earth System Science Partnership (www.essp.org). He further contributes to several (inter)national committees concerned with various aspects of global change.
He currently leads several multidisciplinary projects to develop integrated assessment models for global biodiversity and local/regional ecosystem vulnerability. He was involved in all assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and co-chaired the Response Option Working group of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
His early studies at Uppsala University (Sweden) emphasised the successional dynamics and structure of boreal forests. His subsequent research position at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, Austria) focused on boreal forest models.
During the nineties, he was a senior scientist at the Dutch National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), where he led the development of the integrated IMAGE-2 model. His main research interests concern biodiversity, vegetation structure and dynamics, land-use and cover change, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem services and sustainable development.
Dr. Leemans has published many papers on a wide range of topics, such as forest dynamics, large-scale vegetation and crop distribution, terrestrial C cycle, Earth System models, biodiversity, integrated assessment tools and, more recently, potential mitigation and adaptation options and strategies for environmental change.
Some recent publications
Bakkenes, M., Alkemade, J.R.M., Ihle, F., Leemans, R. and Latour, J.B. 2002. Assessing effects of forecasted climate change on the diversity and distribution of European higher plants for 2050. Global Change Biology 8: 390-407.
Chopra, K., Leemans, R., Kumar, P. and Simons, H. (eds.). 2005. Ecosystems and human well-being: Policy responses. Island Press, Washington DC. 621 pp.
Costanza, R., Graumlich, L., Steffen, W., Crumley, C., Dearing, J., Hibbard, K., Leemans, R., Redman, C. and Schimel, D. 2007. Sustainability or collapse: what can we learn from integrating the history of humans and the rest of nature? Ambio 36: 522-527.
Ewert, F., Rounsevell, M.D.A., Reginster, I., Metzger, M.J. andLeemans, R. 2005. Future scenarios of European agricultural land use. I. Estimating changes in crop productivity. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 107: 101-106.
Fischlin, A., Midgley, G.F., Price, J., Leemans, R., Gopal, B., Turley, C., Rounsevell, M.D.A., Dube, P., Tarazona, J. and Velichko, A.A. 2007. Ecosystems, their properties, goods and services. Pages 211-272. In Parry, M.L. Canziani, O.F., Palutikof, J.P., Hanson, C.E. and Van der Linden, P.J. (eds.). Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Leemans, R., and B. Eickhout. 2004. Another reason for concern: regional and global impacts on ecosystems for different levels of climate change. Global Environmental Change 14: 219-228.
Reynolds, J.F., Smith, D.M.S., Lambin, E.F., Turner, B.L., II, Mortimore, M., Batterbury, S.P.J., Downing, T.E., Dowlatabadi, H., Fernandez, R.J., Herrick, J.E., Huber-Sannwald, E., Jiang, H.,Leemans, R., Lynam, T., Maestre, F.T., Ayarza, M. and Walker, B. 2007. Global desertification: building a science for dryland development. Science 316: 847-851.
Rounsevell, M.D.A., Ewert, F., Reginster, I., Leemans, R. and Carter, T.R. 2005. Future scenarios of European agricultural land use. II. Projecting changes in cropland and grassland. Agriculture,Ecosystems and Environment 107: 117-135.
Schröter, D., Cramer, W., Leemans, R., Prentice, I.C., Araujo, M.B., Arnell, N.W., Bondeau, A, Bugmann, H., Carter, T.R., Gracia, C.A., de la Vega-Leinert, A.C., Erhard, M., Ewert, F., Glendining, M., House, J.I., Kankaanpaa, S., Klein, R.J.T., Lavorel, S., Lindner, M., Metzger, M.J., Meyer, J., Mitchell, T.D., Reginster, I., Rounsevell, M., Sabate, S., Sitch, S., Smith, B., Smith, J., Smith, P., Sykes, M.T., Thonicke, K., Thuiller, W., Tuck, G., Zaehle, S. and Zierl, B. 2005. Ecosystem service supply and vulnerability to global change in Europe. Science 310: 1333-1337.