Inaugural Lecture of Professor Vincent Gauci

Join Professor Vincent Gauci for his Inaugural Lecture, hosted at the Murray Learning Centre, Room UG09 (R28 on the Campus Map) on Thursday 17 October 2024. This is an in-person event, which you can register for here.

Getting to the root of the methane cycle

The COP26 Glasgow Climate Pact made two key pledges to address climate change. The first was to have zero deforestation, with the second to address growth in atmospheric methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. In this lecture I will cover a wide range of research from my team of past and present students, post-doctoral researchers and collaborators, to demonstrate the importance of methane in Earth’s climate and, critically, demonstrate how this gas responds to, and contributes to global change. I will share the latest insights gained from numerous locations around the world into how forests are an unlikely but important player in understanding the methane cycle such that the two Glasgow Climate Pact pledges are themselves interlinked.

Vincent Gauci is an ecosystem scientist and biogeochemist. He makes discoveries on how carbon-rich ecosystems such as forests, wetlands and peatlands function and interact with the atmosphere. He has expertise in quantifying the exchange of powerful greenhouse gases from these ecosystems and agroecosystems in response to global environmental change and has worked and led projects across the Andes, Amazon, Borneo and Sumatra as well as many other locations.

Recently, he made the pioneering discovery that trees are even better for climate than previously thought, through a novel mechanism of atmospheric methane removal. He started his research career with a PhD from the Open University that was supervised by Prof. Nancy Dise and Prof. David Fowler FRS of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh where he worked on the effects of sulphur pollution on methane emissions from Scottish peatlands. He returned to the Open University soon after to take up a post-doctoral research post and then a lectureship in Earth Systems and Ecosystem Science.

In 2016 he was promoted to a personal Chair in Global Change Ecology. He is delighted to have joined the University of Birmingham, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) as Professorial Fellow, while maintaining his visiting Chair in Global Change Ecology at the Open University. He lives with his wife, Claire and his children Oliver (16) and Sylvie (4).

Everyone is welcome to this event, and all are invited to join Vincent after the lecture for refreshments in the Lapworth Museum.