Meet the scientists who contribute to the SPECIAL research group.
We are based in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading.
Prof. Sandy P. Harrison
Professor in Global Palaeoclimates and Biogeochemical Cycles
Sandy works on the interactions between the terrestrial biosphere and climate in the past, present and future. She leads the LEMONTREE project, an international consortium whose goal is to build a next-generation model of the terrestrial biosphere and its interactions with the carbon cycle, water cycle and climate. LEMONTREE exploits the power of eco-evolutionary optimality theory to provide simple and robust ways of simulating plant behaviour in response to environmental conditions. Sandy is a Co-Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, which seeks to provide a step-change in our understanding of the complexity of landscape fires. Sandy is leading the development of new approaches to modelling vegetation-fire interactions as well as actively promoting the use of palaeodata to explore the controls on fire regimes and for model evaluation. Sandy is a palaeoclimate diagnostician, using large-scale palaeoenvironmental data syntheses and various types of process-based models to study the interaction of climate and the terrestrial biosphere in the geologic past and the present day. The goal of her work is to use the mechanistic understanding of interactions developed under radically different climate of the past to improve our ability to predict the likely trajectory of future climate and environmental changes.