Professor Jerry F. Franklin
Professor of Ecosystem Analysis
College of Forest Resources
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

Dr. Jerry Franklin is Professor of Ecosystem Analysis in the College of Forest Resources, University of Washington. He is a senior consultant for Interforest, LLC. Previously, he was Chief Plant Ecologist, USDA Forest Service, and Professor of Forest Science and Botany at Oregon State University. He also served as Director of the Ecosystem Studies Program of the National Science Foundation. He is one of the pioneers of forest ecosystem research, with specialisations in structure and function of natural forest ecosystems; successional processes following catastrophic disturbances; effects of changing environmental conditions on forest processes; application of ecological principles to the management of natural resources; and theory and practical applications of landscape ecology. He is a past president of the Ecological Society of America and has served on the Board of Governors of the Nature Conservancy. He has served on the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team, the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, and the American Indian Forestry Management Assessment Team. He is a world leader in forest management research and his research is documented in nearly 300 publications.

 

Professor Jürgen Bauhus
Director, Institute of Silviculture, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

Jürgen studied Forestry in Freiburg, Vienna, and Göttingen and worked in Germany and Canada before he worked in the ANU Forestry Program between 1996 and 2003. Since June 2003 he has held a professorship and the Chair of Silviculture in the Faculty of Forest and Environmental Sciences at Freiburg University, Germany. His research focuses on ecology and silviculture of native forests, carbon and nutrient cycling, dynamics of mixed-species stands, structural diversity and coarse woody debris. He is section editor of the European Journal of Forest Research, Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research and an associate of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Accounting. At Freiburg University, he is directing the International PhD Program "Forestry in Transition", the German-French binational PhD program in "Risk Management in Forestry", and the new international MSc course "Forests, Environment and Bioresourcs".

Professor Peter Kanowski
Professor of Forestry
Forest and environmental policy, forest genetics, forestry and environmental education
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Peter Kanowski has been Head of the School of Resources, Environment and Society since it was established in 2001. Peter was appointed Professor of Forestry at ANU in 1995, and was Head of the ANU Department of Forestry from 1996 -2001. He was Co- Convenor of the ANU Institute for Environment in 2004, and has been Deputy Director since 2005. In 2003/4, Peter was a member of the panel conducting the Council of Australian Governments' National Inquiry into Bushfires. He was a member of the Steering Committee for the ACT's post-bushfire Non-Urban Land Use Study in 2003, a member of the ACT International Arboretum Jury and then Interim Board in 2004-6, and was a member of the ACT Water Supply Catchment Management Advisory Committee in 2005.

Peter grew up in country Queensland, with a forester father, schoolteacher mother and six siblings - all helpful background for a forestry academic with administrative responsibilities. He was Schlich Medallist at the ANU Department of Forestry and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University; his honours and doctoral work were both in forest genetics. Peter worked as both a forest and a research program manager with the Queensland Department of Forestry, before moving to Oxford University's Forestry Institute in 1988, where he lectured in forest policy and forest genetics.

Since returning to Australia in 1995, Peter has chaired or co-facilitated a number of community engagement processes about forest conservation and management, including the Southern Regional Forest Forum and the NSW Western Regional Assessment community fora. He has continued to work internationally, in forestry education and in intergovernmental forest policy processes.


Professor Juan Armesto
Centre of Advanced Studies in Ecology and Biodiversity, Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, Chile.

Professor Armesto is the Head of the Centre of Advanced Studies in Ecology and Biodiversity at the Catholic University of Chile, is president of the "Senda Darwin" Foundation of Chile, and has received numerous professional awards and fellowships. His research has focused on understanding and predicting how humans affect biological diversity in rural landscapes in southern Chile, including the links between soil biodiversity and the processes that sustain productivity in old-growth forests, the effect of habitat fragmentation, and the relevance of the ecosystem engineering properties of trees for maintaining biodiversity and for enhancing forest recovery from anthropogenic disturbance. The purpose of the research is to identify critical species (or functional
groups) and biotic processes that sustain the biodiversity and productivity in Chilean temperate rainforests, including functional groups in temperate forest ecosystems that are most sensitive to losses of biodiversity.

Professor Antonio Lara
Institute of Silviculture,
University Austral de Chile, Santiago, Chile  

Professor Lara is from the Institute of Silviculture at the University of Austral de Chile where he heads the research group working on forest ecosystem services (FORECOS).  His research includes the ecology and conservation of native forest; silvicultural systems, dendrochronology, climate change, and multi-disciplinary studies into landscape-scale management. He is active in many scientific partnerships (national and international) involving government, industry and conservation organisations.  He has been a catalyst for many of these partnerships, and is a key figure in driving Chile’s approach to management and conservation of temperate forests.


Professor Sally Aitken
Professor; Director, Centre for Forest Gene Conservation;
Program Director, Forest Science undergraduate program
Department of Forest Sciences
Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada

Sally Aitken received her Bachelor’s degree in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC in 1984, and her M.Sc. (1986) and Ph.D. (1990) at the University of California at Berkeley.  She was a Research Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Pacific Northwest Tree Improvement Cooperative in the Department of Forest Science at Oregon State University from 1991 through 1996.   She then joined the Department of Forest Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, to fill the NSERC/Industry Junior Chair in Genetics, where she is currently Professor, Director of the Forest Sciences undergraduate program, and Director of the Centre for Forest Gene Conservation (www.genetics.forestry.ubc.ca/cfgc).  

Sally's teaching responsibilities include forest biology and conservation genetics, and she strives to make the role of genetics in forest management and conservation understandable and accessible to all students. Her research seeks to better understand the genetic structure of local adaptation of forest trees at the ecological, phenotypic, genetic and genomic levels; the respective roles and interactions of natural selection and gene flow in generating population structure; and the capacity of populations of forest trees to adapt or migrate in the face of rapid climate change.  Current projects of her research team include investigating the evolutionary potential and conservation importance of peripheral, disjunct populations; dissecting the genomic basis of genetically complex traits involved in local adaptation to temperature; and testing bioclimatic envelope models of current and future species distribution using field common garden experiments.  She plays an active role in the development of policy recommendations and operational programs for genetic conservation and management at the provincial and national levels in Canada. 
 

Dr Michael Brown
Honorary Research Associate, School of Plant Science, University of Tasmania, Australia

Michael Brown is an Honorary Research Associate, School of Plant Science, University of Tasmania and part-time consultant for a number of agencies on conservation ecology. Worked for many years in the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service and with Forestry Tasmania, where he was Chief Scientist on his retirement in 2003. More than 35 years experience in the fields of conservation and ecology, and author or co-author of more then 140 scientific and technical publications on forest ecology, fire ecology, biological conservation and other aspects of vegetation science. Instigated the Warra Long Term Ecological Research Site in Tasmania, promoted establishment of the National LTER network and represented Australia on the Steering Committee for the establishment of the International LTER network.


Fred Swanson
USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station
Forestry Sciences Lab, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

Fred Swanson is a Research Geologist and ecosystem scientist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, and Professor (courtesy) in the Departments of Forest Science and Geosciences, Oregon State University. For many years he has studied the interactions of physical processes, such as fire, flood, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and forestry operations, including roads, with forest and stream ecosystems. He has been involved with the Andrews Forest Long-Term Ecological Research program since its inception in 1980 and works intensively in the research-land management partnership based at Andrews Forest. His interests are reflected in titles of books on which he has worked with many colleagues: “Sediment Budgets and Routing in Forested Catchments” (1982); “Bioregional Assessments: Science at the Crossroads of Management and Policy” (1999); “Road Ecology: Science and Solutions” (2002); and “Ecological Responses to the Eruption of Mount St. Helens” (2005).
 

Professor David Lindenmayer
Professor of Ecology and Conservation Biology
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

David Lindenmayer is Professor of Ecology and Conservation Biology at The Australian National University. He manages five large-scale long-term research programs spanning native forests, plantations, woodland restoration and reserve/fire management in south-eastern Australia. He has worked in the wet ash forests of the Central Highlands of Victoria for the past 24 years where he has completed a wide range of research projects.

Professor Lindenmayer has written 18 books and 460 scientific articles on forest ecology and management, wildlife biology, conservation biology, woodland restoration and management and a wide range of other topics related to natural resource conservation and management.

William J. (Bill) Beese
Forest Ecologist, Corporate Forestry, Western Forest Products Inc.
British Columbia, Canada

Bill is Forest Ecologist for Western Forest Products in Campbell River, British Columbia (BC), Canada.  He has worked for over 25 years on the BC coast, since completing a Master’s degree in Forest Ecology at the University of BC. Bill began his career in forestry studying the oak-hickory forests of Southern Illinois.  He then conducted site classification, fuels surveys and stream inventories for the US Forest Service in Montana in support of wilderness fire management plans. He worked as a forester in the Queen Charlotte Islands where he also helped develop the ecological classification system for the QCI.  Since 1983, he has done research, environmental consulting and policy development for several successor forest companies.

Bill is responsible for a program that includes research in silvicultural systems, prescribed burning erosion control, forest regeneration and stand tending, biodiversity, and small stream management.  He leads the company’s monitoring and adaptive management program, oversees ecosystem mapping, and is project co-coordinator for the multi-agency MASS research partnership investigating silvicultural systems for high elevation forests.  He was part of a team that developed and implemented the Coast Forest Strategy--the company’s forest ecosystem stewardship program, including phase-in of variable retention harvesting. This program received the Ecological Society of America’s Corporate Award for 2001. Bill is a Registered Professional Forester, and was chosen as “Coastal Silviculturist of the Year” in 2000.

Graham Wilkinson
Chief Forest Practices Officer
Forest Practices Authority, Tasmania, Australia

Graham Wilkinson is the head of Tasmania’s Forest Practices Authority with responsibilities for the day to day administration of the State’s forest practices system. His career spans 30 years of experience in forest management, silvicultural research, forest policy and regulation.

Graham also works extensively within the Asia-Pacific region as a consultant to the United Nations and the World Bank on projects related to the implementation of codes of forest practice and sustainable forest management.


Associate Professor Benjamin Cashore
Associate Professor, Environmental Policy and Governance and Political Science;
Director, Program on Forest Policy and Governance
Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Benjamin Cashore is Associate Professor, Environmental Policy and Governance, specializing in Sustainable Forest Policy, at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He is Director of the Yale Program on Forest Certification and is courtesy jointed appointed (Associate Professor) in Yale’s Department of Political Science. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto, BA and MA degrees in political science from Carleton University, and a certificate from Université d’Aix-Marseille III in French Studies. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University during the 1996-1997 academic year.

He has held positions as Assistant Professor, School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University (1998-2001); postdoctoral fellow, Forest Economics and Policy Analysis Research Unit, University of British Columbia (1997-1998), and as a policy advisor to the leader of the Canadian New Democratic Party (1990-1993).

Cashore’s new book, Governing Through Markets: Forest Certification and the Emergence of Non-state Authority (with Graeme Auld and Deanna Newsom) was awarded the International Studies Association’s 2005 Sprout prize for the best book on international environmental policy and politics. Published by Yale University Press in 2004, the book identifies the emergence of non-state market driven global environmental governance, and compares its support within European and North American forest sectors.

Cashore is also co-editor of Forest Policy for Private Forestry (with Teeter and Zhang), CAB International; and coauthor of In Search of Sustainability: The Politics of Forest Policy in British Columbia in the 1990s (with George Hoberg, Michael Howlett, Jeremy Raynor and Jeremy Wilson) from the University of British Columbia Press.

He is also author or co-author of several articles that have appeared in Governance, Policy Sciences, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Business and Politics, Forest Policy and Economics, the Journal of Forestry, Canadian Public Administration, Canadian-American Public Policy, the Russian Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology and the Forestry Chronicle, as well as chapters in several edited books published by Oxford University Press, Ashgate Press, Macmillan UK, Transaction Press, the University of British Columbia Press, the University of Toronto Press, CAB International, Forstbuch Press, and IUFRO.

In addition to the 2005 Sprout prize, Cashore was awarded (with Steven Bernstein) the 2001 John McMenemy prize for the best article to appear in the Canadian Journal of Political Science in the year 2000 for their article, “Globalization, Four Paths of Internationalization and Domestic Policy Change: The Case of Eco-forestry in British Columbia, Canada.”