Special Session 14

SPECIAL SESSION #14

Nadia Vendrame

Center Agriculture Food Environment (C3A), University of Trento, Italy

• nadia.vendrame@unitn.it

Francesco Reyes

Life Sciences Department, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

• francesco.reyes@unimore.it

Damiano Zanotelli

Faculty of Science and Technology - Free Universtity of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy

• damiano.zanotelli@unibz.it

The assessment of exchanges of mass and energy between ecosystems and the atmosphere is of pivotal importance both for agronomic purposes and environmental issues. On the one hand, monitoring and modelling these exchanges help improve our current understanding of the ecophysiology of crops and forest stands. On the other, it offers valuable information to support decision-making, promoting an effcient use of external inputs (e.g. irrigation). Additionally, the quantitative assessment of important ecosystem services, such as carbon assimilation rate and storage, depends on our ability to estimate the mass and energy exchanges of agroecosystems or forests.

This session is thus dedicated to collect studies aimed at investigating the ecophysiological performances of managed and unmanaged ecosystems (and their compartments) by direct measurements and modelling approaches, especially in the context of climate change.

Nadia Vendrame, is a researcher at the Center Agriculture Food Environment (C3A) of the University of Trento. In 2017, she earned the PhD in Crop Science at the Department of Agronomy, Food, Natural resources, Animals and Environment (DAFNAE) of the University of Padova, where she also conducted research as postdoc. Afterwards, she joined the scientific staff of the Ecosystem Thematic Centre (ETC) of the EU research infrastructure Integrated Carbon Observation System (ICOS) in Viterbo. Her research interests focus on the study of vegetation-atmosphere interactions, with particular attention on the microclimate and carbon and water budget of agroecosystems. She has a sound experience in conducting long-term and intensive field campaigns to assess carbon, water and sensible heat fuxes applying micrometeorological techniques (eddy covariance and scintillometry). She also investigated the evolution of canopy turbulent transport mechanics in vineyards in relation to leaf development during the growing season.

Francesco Reyes, is is Assistant Professor at Life Sciences Department of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His research focuses on the analysis and modeling of plant growth in relation to canopy structure and microclimate, as affected by artifcial (protection screens) and natural (other dominant vegetation) covers. His expertise on process-based models spans from Functional Structural Plant Models to plot scale agroforestry models but extends as well to more empirical approaches and the integration of remote sensing data. He obtained his MSc in Sustainable Development at the University of Utrecht and his PhD at the Free University of Bolzano (2016). He is part of the editorial board of Agroforestry Systems.

Damiano Zanotelli, is Assistant professor (tenure track RTD/B) at the Faculty of Science and Technology at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (UNIBZ), he received a joint Ph.D in Horticultural Sciences (Doctor Europaeus) from the Universities of Bologna and Bolzano in 2012. His main research interests are dealing with the assessment of carbon and water fuxes in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum as well as the crop nutrition in woody agroecosystems, especially with respect to changing environmental conditions and the occurrence of abiotic stresses. At the present (January 2023), according to Scopus, he is the author of 41 publications in internationally referred Journals, with an H-index of 13.