Ana Maria Yañez Serrano

I did my undergraduate in Environmental Science at the University of Nottingham. Then I did my master's in Biogeochemical cycles and Atmospheric Sciences in Lund University, Sweden. After I did my PhD in climate and the environment at the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in co-supervision with the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry. Afterwards I continued as a post doctorate researcher for MPIC in the Amazon. My research was based on the interactions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) within and above a central Amazonian tropical rainforest. My latest position as a Post doctoral researcher was at Freiburg University (Germany), working in an ERC grant trying to find out how much carbon is emitted by plants through secondary plant metabolism from tropical plants.

I am interested in the interaction between forest ecosystems and atmospheric chemistry. Forest can react very quickly to changes in environmental factors, and up to date, not all processes have been described or elucidated. As global temperatures increase and climate change exacerbates it is important to understand how forested areas will react to such changes, as the impact in atmosphere can be very large, from direct global warming via aerosol and carbon dioxide production, increase the atmospheric lifetime of pollutants, or even alter rain distribution locally. We need to provide better information for modellers, so they can constrain the processes governing the forest atmosphere interactions so better guidelines on mitigation and adaptation strategies can be suggested to policy-makers.