Suzette Flantua

Suzette Flantua is a researcher at the Department of Biological Sciences and head of the TMS starting grant project “Past, Present and Future of Alpine Biomes Worldwide (PPF Alpine)”. She has a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Amsterdam (2017). After working at the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew (London) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI, Panama), she got affiliated with the University of Bergen and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research through the ERC project HOPE (Humans On Planet Earth) since 2018. From April 2022, she is fulltime linked to the TMS project which now also welcomed a new researcher (computational geoscientist) for three years. Two PhD researchers will join the team from January 2023 onwards. The project has a large international network who will be contributing with expertise and data to the different outputs of the project.

This project will study the past, the present and the future of the ecosystems that are along the highest parts of mountains globally, the ‘alpine’ zone. Many believe that these ecosystems might be especially vulnerable to future global warming so this project will look at how past climate change (during the last 130,000 yr) impacted what we see today, how it influenced present-day biodiversity, and so to derive key insights in understanding how mountain ecosystems will cope with future change. Our understanding of the past is crucial for the discussion on conservation efforts in mountains in the present, but for that we need to build the full picture of what we know of their history. By reconstructing in detail the dynamic history of high-elevation ecosystems – here the glaciers and alpine ecosystems – there is a fascinating world to uncover on the interaction between climate change and mountain biodiversity, and this is exactly what this project will be focusing on. The project also specifically aims at creating compelling and accessible content of the research outcomes for all ages, including multi-lingual, animated visualizations, children-friendly graphics, and science-policy briefs. This links especially strong to the macro-goals of the University of Bergen to further bring academic knowledge from research to society.