Annemarie Reurslag Gärdenäs
Senior Lecturer
Department of Biological & EnvironmentalAbout Annemarie Reurslag Gärdenäs
Employment Senior lecturer in Environmental Sciences, with focus on Risk and Environmental Impact Assessment (75% research and 25% teaching).
Research profile I’m a system ecologist with a Biogeophysical perspective. I study how biological, chemical and physical processes together govern fluxes of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and radionuclides in terrestrial ecosystems. My research interests fit within the triangle of i) sustainable land use and management, ii) environmental change and iii) other anthropogenic drivers. Examples of other anthropogenic drivers are policy, economy, as well as long-distance contamination by nitrogen or radioactive deposition.
Approaches: I develop and refine process-based models to analyse relationships between management, vegetation, soil, climate and hydrology. Hereby, I use data from field and greenhouse experiments as well as the Swedish National Inventories to test hypotheses and validate models. With my research I aim to contribute to an improved understanding of land-climate interactions and thereby provide scientific base for sustainable land use. See webpage of System Ecology.
Ongoing and recent projects Sustainable trees to promote sustainable cities in a changing climate (Lasse Tarvainen PI). Our aim is to evaluate tree species for their suitability for future urban environments of Northern Europe. We identify stress tolerance of various tree traits in greenhouse and field experiments in Gothenburg, Sweden. I am especially involved into assessing the long-term responses of trees to climate change and climate stress by modelling.
We used the Q-model to estimate the combined impacts of land use change and climate change on soil organic carbon stocks in the Ethiopian highlands for the coming century (Shibabaw et al. 2023). We showed that use of a model like Q is a viable option for improving accuracy in national reporting changes in SOC stocks within the LULUCF sector to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
We integrated a model for phosphorous cycling in terrestrial ecosystem into the CoupModel, co-funded by Univ. of Gothenburg and MERGE (He et al. 2021). We are especially interested in the phosphorus and nitrogen interactions affecting forest growth and nutrient leaching.I led the Formas-funded project ‘Organic Beef production and other Ecosystem Services’. The focus of this study is the interplay between organic beef production, wood production, biodiversity, climate regulation and economy in a landscape consisting of forest, semi-natural pastures, arable land, and wetlands. I continue the study of climate regulation during my sabbatical at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.As core member of the Formas strong research environment IMPRESS – Integrating Microorganisms in Predictive Models of Carbon Sequestration in Soils, I studied together with colleagues at the University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden, the combined effect of climate and nitrogen availability on functioning of soil microbes.
Together with Dept. of Earth Sciences, Univ. of Gothenburg, two on-going projects; a Guidebook for rewetting drained peat lands to turn them from GHG source to sink (Kasimir, PI) and the MERGE-funded project 'Towards improved understanding of albedo’s climate forcing of common land uses across Sweden' (Gärdenäs, PI).
Teaching: I teach several Environmental Sciences courses and I’m the course organizer of ‘Proceser i Miljö, SMG120’ and Miljökonsekvensanalys ES1401. Before 2016, I worked full-time at the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences, where I among other things was the Director of Research school Focus on Soils & Water and supervisor of several PhD-students:
Principal supervisorLinnea Hansson, 2019 Impacts of forestry operations on soil physical properties, water and temperature dynamics with focus on off-road traffic and soil scarificationDr Martin Rappe George 2016. Nitrogen in Soil Water of Coniferous Forests - Effects of Anthropogenic Disturbances SLUDr Kristina Mjöfors, 2015. Effects of Site Preparation and Stump Harvest on Carbon Dynamics in Forest Soils.SLU
Co-supervisor Anna Lindahl SLU, 2009 Soil Physics; Carina Ortiz SLU, 2012 Soil Sciences and Biogeochemistry; Solomon Gebreyohannis SLU, Sweden & Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia 2012 Forest Hydrology; Stefan Bengtson SLU, 2013 Radioecology
Ongoing co-supervisor: Astrid Fridell