Oliver John Binks

I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, where I looked at the capacity of some tropical rainforest tree species to alter leaf-level hydraulic traits in response to long-term experimentally imposed drought. The following five years I spent in a postdoctoral position at the Australian National University in Canberra, broadening my research to encompass water movement through soil and plants, and its transition into the atmosphere. This research was based on field data that I collected from the Brazilian Amazon and Australian tropical rainforests.

I have recently started to take an interest in how forests function synergistically. The combination of plasticity at the level of the individual tree, and species selection by the environment, generates a community that is effectively optimised to exploit available resources with a high level of efficiency. This view, forests as self-organising complex structures, may influence how we scale from individual tree-level measurements to ecosystem-level processes, our sampling strategies in field studies, and our understanding of climate-related tipping points in ecosystem structure and function.

I am now working in a postdoctoral position at CREAF, supervised by Prof. Maurizio Mencuccini, for the H2020, EU funded, FORGENIUS project. I will be looking at the role of water storage and hydraulic capacitance in the climate sensitivity of European tree species and forests. On October 2022 I got a competitive MSCA grant.