Guido van der Werf

This PhD project investigates how forest carbon uptake is changing worldwide under climate change and disturbance. The successful candidate will combine atmospheric CO₂ observations, Earth Observation products, and numerical models to quantify how the global forest carbon sink varies across continents and over time. The work focuses on integrating multiple data streams into an existing prototype modelling framework and extending its data assimilation capacity so it can use large Earth Observation datasets. These datasets include information on forest biomass, forest age structure, and disturbances such as fires, alongside high-precision atmospheric monitoring networks such as ICOS. The goal is to move from the current European domain to a global scale and to analyse how forest management, biodiversity loss, fire, pests, and climate change affect carbon balance. The project is part of EUFOR-G3W, a Horizon Europe initiative contributing to the WMO Global Greenhouse Gas Watch. You will work with the CarbonTracker family of greenhouse gas models and data products, using national and institutional high-performance computing resources to run and develop large-scale carbon cycle simulations. The resulting integrated forest carbon balances will be compared with national accounting methods for land-use and land-use change. You will be based in the Meteorology and Air Quality Group at Wageningen University & Research, working with a carbon cycle team led by Prof. Wouter Peters, Prof. Guido van der Werf, and Dr. Ingrid Luijkx. The group studies atmospheric processes and their interactions with the Earth’s surface, with a strong focus on greenhouse-gas exchange between land, ocean, and atmosphere. The environment is described as open, social, diverse, collaborative, and stimulating, and the project also includes close collaboration with Simon Besnard and a second PhD candidate at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. The project sits at the interface of atmospheric science, Earth Observation, ecosystem science, and climate policy, with international collaboration and opportunities to present research globally.