At the invitation of Prof. Huang Xiaozhong from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lanzhou University, Prof. Colin I. Prentice from Imperial College London, UK, will visit our university for academic exchange and deliver a lecture on July 13, 2026. All faculty members and students are welcome to attend!
Reporter: Prof. Colin I. Prentice
Title: Eco-evolutionary optimality for next generation land-surface models
Time: 10:00-11:00, July 13, 2026 (Monday)
Venue: Meeting Room 502, Qilian Hall, Chengguan Campus, Lanzhou University
Reporter Profile:
Colin I. Prentice is Chair Professor in Biosphere and Climate Impacts in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, UK, a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), an internationally renowned ecologist and Earth system scientist, and the founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany. He has long been dedicated to research on the global terrestrial biosphere and its dynamic interactions with the atmosphere and climate, with research directions spanning terrestrial ecosystem modelling, vegetation–climate feedbacks, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, fire disturbance, and the assessment of global environmental change impacts. He has significant international influence in the fields of global vegetation modelling, palaeovegetation reconstruction, and Earth system science. Prof. Prentice is a pioneer in the development of global plant-geography models and one of the principal leaders of BIOME 6000, the landmark international programme for global palaeovegetation reconstruction. He has played an important role in advancing the BIOME family of global plant-geography models as well as the LPJ and LPX dynamic global vegetation models. In recent years, he has focused on developing a new generation of terrestrial ecosystem and land-surface models based on eco-evolutionary optimality theory, providing an important theoretical framework for improving the representation of vegetation, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, and climate feedback processes in Earth system models. Prof. Prentice has published over 400 academic articles, with a total of more than 120,000 citations and an h-index of 158.
Key Laboratory of Western China's Environmental Systems, Ministry of Education, China
July 12, 2026
