Regents Professor, Virginia M. Ullman Professor, and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist, Arizona State University, USA

NANCY B. GRIMM is an ecosystem ecologist and interdisciplinary sustainability scientist who studies interactions of climate change, human activities, resilience, and biogeochemical processes in urban and stream ecosystems. From 1997-2016 Grimm directed the Central Arizona–Phoenix LTER (CAP LTER), a pioneering interdisciplinary study of a complex metropolitan region whose conceptual models of social-ecological-technological systems expanded ecology. She now co-directs the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (URExSRN), working with cities to co-produce visions of resilient and sustainable futures, and the new NATURA network of international networks that focuses on nature-based solutions to urban resilience challenges in the Anthropocene. She continues her long-term studies of stream ecosystems, with recent work on high-frequency measurement of metabolism in aridland streams (part of streamPULSE) and impacts of fire on carbon cycling in stream ecosystems.

Grimm is a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Past President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and the Society for Freshwater Science (SFS), and a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, ESA, SFS, and the American Geophysical Union. She is an editor for Earth’s Future, and editorial advisor for Ecohydrology and the Journal of Urban Ecology. She has published more than 200 articles and book chapters on topics ranging from stream ecosystem dynamics and nitrogen cycling to urban social-ecological-technological systems and co-production of future scenarios for cities.

Country: Spain. Departament de Biologia Evolutiva, Ecologia i Ciències Ambientals. Universitat de Barcelona.

Scientific trajectory: I developed my PhD in Ecology at University of Murcia (2014), where I studied how ecosystems respond to natural and anthropogenic stressors using different approaches. In my first postdoctoral position (Cardiff University, 2015-17) quantifying multiple-stressor effects in European rivers and identifying which river biodiversity aspects best predict ecosystem service delivery in UK upland rivers.

Later, I worked at University of Barcelona the mechanisms explaining river metacommunities at rivers in response to predictable drought.

Currently, I work as a postdoc at University of Minho exploring how climate change impact on river food webs and how this translates into changes in ecosystem multifunctionality.

During these years, I published 23 papers in SCI-journals, and published/edited ~200 outreach posts at my co-managed blog and other media.

Research lines: In my research, I explore the effects of multiple global change pressures on biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions and services, using a variety of quantitative approaches. Combining taxonomic and trait-based approaches, my studies aim at identifying which ecological mechanisms link multiple-stressors, biodiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality.

My studies cover different ecosystems and organisms (river invertebrates and fishes, coastal plants, vertebrate scavengers) to look for general responses to global change.

Country: Uruguay. Universidad de la República/ Centro Universitario Regional Este - UDeLaR / Departamento de Ecología y Gestión Ambiental

PhD. Professor at the Ecology and Environmental Department of Universidad de la República, Uruguay.

Her research focuses particularly on the potential effects of climate warming and land use changes on community structure and trophic dynamics, as well as ecosystem processes, of shallow lakes, streams and reservoirs. Her work involves laboratory and field experiments, field studies and space for time substitution studies.

She has published around 60 papers and several book chapters and edited books. She is Associate Editor of the journals Freshwater Biology, Hydrobiologia, Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, and Ecología Austral. Collaborates with research groups in Argentina, Brazil, USA, Spain, Denmark, The Netherlands, Turkey.

Country: Brazil. Biology Department, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, where she is co-leader of the Ecology group.

She got a PhD in Ecology from the University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, in 2012. Her thesis was about carbon emission and sequestration in hydroelectric reservoirs and it was partly developed at Wageningen University in The Netherlands.

Raquel was a post-doc at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, in The Netherlands, where she studied the sinergic effects of warming and eutrophication on the carbon balance of shallow lakes.

At Uppsala University, in Sweden, she worked in an ERC-granted project that aimed to improve the knowledge about the carbon dynamics of tropical reservoirs.

Raquel is interested on the various aspects of the aquatic biogeochemistry. She is part of a leading group on CO2 and CH4 emissions from reservoirs and she has published some pioneer studies on the carbon sequestration by inland waters.

Country: Italy. Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Biosystems and Environmental Change at the University of Birmingham (UoB), and a time traveller.

She studies the processes and mechanisms of evolutionary response to climate and other environmental factors with relevance to climate – pollution, anthropogenic land-use. To reconstruct long-term dynamics she applies high throughput technologies to sedimentary archives of inland waters, which have the unique advantage of preserving biological and environmental signals temporally.

Moreover, she applies high throughput technologies to ‘resurrected’ specimens of the keystone species Daphnia magna (waterflea) to identify the molecular mechanisms that enable evolutionary changes through time and space.

Dr Orsini strongly believes in bridging the science/policy divide. To this end, she works on biotechnology solutions for the removal of pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other suspended materials from wastewater and surface water.

Country: Spain. Lifetime Achievement Award in Limnology of the Iberian Association of Limnology-2020.

The Iberian Association of Limnology has awarded the first Lifetime Achievement Award in Limnology to Professor Dr. Narcis Prat i Fornells for his contribution to the development of Limnology in the Iberian Peninsula.

In the same way this award acknowledges his vast scientific production, his enthusiastic teaching and training dedication, his activity in outreach actions to both society and water resource managers, and his commitment to the conservation of aquatic ecosystems.

Country: Spain. Postdoctoral Fellow. Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo (Norway).

He got a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) in 2018. His thesis, partially developed at the University of Vienna (Austria), encompassed a multidisciplinary approach to assess the natural attenuation of agricultural pollutants (mainly nitrate) in the Pétrola Lake, one of the most representative saline wetlands in the Castilla-La Mancha region (central Iberian Peninsula).

This study was awarded by the Iberian Association of Limnology in 2020.

Currently, he works in the Section for Aquatic Biology and Toxicology, as part of the recently created Center for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene, at the University of Oslo. He is involved in a BiodivERsA project focused on filling gaps in Arctic freshwater biodiversity knowledge, where he combines tools like multi-OMICS or stable isotopes to link diversity (taxonomic and functional) with biogeochemical responses.

Nicolas is especially interested in extreme environments including polar regions (Svalbard, Finse, Finnmark) or hypersaline ecosystems, focused on the high relevance of lakes and ponds in such ecosystems for the global carbon and nitrogen cycles.