Editors

About the Editor

Markus Stoffel was born in Switzerland in 1974. Having passed his childhood and adolescence in the Valais Alps, he was intrigued to study the impacts of climate change on mountain environments. He undertook his university studies at different institutions within Switzerland and holds BSc and MSc degrees in Physical Geography, a MSc degree in Media and Communication Sciences and a PhD in Physical Geography from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), as well as a habilitation thesis degree (venia docendi) from the University of Berne (Switzerland). Since 2010, he also is a Distinguished Professor (Professor honoris causa) in Physical Geography of the University Babeş-Bolyai (Romania).

On August 1, 2017, Markus Stoffel was appointed Full Professor of Climate Change Impacts and Risks in the Anthropocene (C-CIA; www.unige.ch/climate) at the Institute for Environmental Sciences (ISE), University of Geneva. He is also the director of the Swiss Tree-Ring Lab (www.dendrolab.ch) at the Department of Earth Sciences, and a faculty at the Department F.-A. Forel for Aquatic and Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva. His research aims to understand, document and quantify fundamental environmental processes, and the drivers of change. Much of the research of his group involves the development of applications of tree-ring techniques and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). His team observes, documents and analyzes environmental and climatic changes both at the local and the hemispheric scales and by covering daily to seasonal, decadal, centennial and millenial timeframes.

In a nutshell, his research is related to climate change impacts, time-series and dynamics of hydro-geomorphic and earth-surface processes at altitude and/or high latitudes, as well as on dendroecology and wood anatomy of trees and shrubs. More particularly, he has been working over the past few years on the impacts of climatic changes on periglacial mass movements, the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate (temperature, precipitation), peatland evolution over the Holocene and its link to hydroclimatic changes, the effects of climate and global changes on biodiversity, biomass or sequestered carbon in the Himalayas, Myanmar and the Andes, or on causes and effects of erosion in badlands or along the Mediterranean coast. As such, the work of his C-CIA team has contributed to the understanding of the large set of impacts of environmental and/or climatic changes on humans and societies.

Markus Stoffel has authored more than 270 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Nature Climate Change, Nature Geoscience, Nature Communications or PNAS. He is a co-editor-in-chief of Geomorphology, and acted as guest editor of Anthropocene, Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, Environment International, Journal of Hydrology, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, Science of the Total Environment. He co-edited two AGLO books dedicated to Tree Rings and Natural Hazards (2010) and Tracking torrential processes on fans and cones (2012), in addition to a Treatise on Geomorphology (2014), The International Encyclopedia of Geography: Cryosphere (2016) and Flood Risk in the Upper Vistula Basin (2017).