Draft:Willy Tinner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Willy Tinner (born 18 July 1965 in Italy) is an Italian and Swiss paleoecologist and professor at the University of Bern, where he serves as Head of the Paleoecology Section at the Institute of Plant Sciences.[1] He is a member of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR) and has served as Director of the Institute of Plant Sciences and Studies President of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Bern.[2] Tinner was co-chair of PAGES (Past Global Changes), a global research programme involving more than 5,500 researchers, from 2017 to 2022.[3]
 | Review waiting, please be patient.
This may take 2 months or more, since drafts are reviewed in no specific order. There are 3,478 pending submissions waiting for review.
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
Reviewer tools
|
His research focuses on reconstructing past environmental changes over time scales ranging from years to millennia. He uses methods such as pollen analysis, macrofossil analysis, charcoal analysis, chironomid analysis, ancient DNA, and dynamic vegetation modelling to study the long term interactions among climate, the biosphere, and human societies.[4] As of 2025, Tinner has published more than 400 scientific articles and accumulated over 23,500 citations on Google Scholar, with an h-index of 84.[5]
Education and career
Tinner was born in Italy and holds both Italian and Swiss citizenship.[2] He studied at the University of Bern, where he received a Master of Science in 1993 with a major in geography and minors in botany, geology and archaeology.[2] He completed his doctoral thesis in 1998 on the vegetation and fire dynamics of the southern Alps, supervised by Brigitta Ammann and Marco Conedera.[2] In 2005 he received his habilitation in geobotany and paleoecology from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Bern.[2]
From 1999 to 2001, Tinner worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Plant Biology, where he collaborated with fire ecologist Feng Sheng Hu.[2] He returned to Bern in 2001 and was appointed assistant professor in 2008. He held a position as SNF professor at ETH Zurich in 2007 to 2008 before becoming associate professor at Bern in 2011 and full professor (ordinarius) in 2018.[2]
Research
Tinner has led field expeditions on several continents, including coring campaigns in Alaska (1999 to 2000), Kyrgyzstan (2003 to 2005), Sicily (2004 to 2018), Ecuador (2009), Ukraine (2011 to 2017), and Cyprus (2021).[2] Since 2003, he has acquired approximately 18.7 million CHF in competitive research funding as principal investigator and co-investigator.[2] He has supervised 17 doctoral theses as primary supervisor and 31 Master's theses.[2]
Fire ecology and abrupt climate change
Tinner's early work focused on fire ecology and vegetation history in southern Switzerland. His studies of lake sediments in the Ticino region were among the first to compare charcoal records in lake sediments with historically documented forest fires.[6] His 1999 paper on long term fire dynamics in southern Switzerland, published in the Journal of Ecology, became one of his most cited works.[7] Working with Feng Sheng Hu at the University of Illinois, Tinner also developed widely adopted methods for reconstructing fire history from microscopic charcoal particles.[8]
A landmark contribution was his 2001 study in Geology (co-authored with André F. Lotter), which demonstrated that Central European vegetation responded within 0 to 20 years to the abrupt climate event around 8,200 years ago. Using annually laminated sediments, Tinner and Lotter showed that hazel collapsed while beech and fir invaded new areas, resolving vegetation responses at time scales comparable to Greenland ice cores.[9] Tinner also contributed to a major 2009 synthesis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which used charcoal records from 35 sites across North America to show that wildfires responded rapidly to abrupt climate changes over the past 17,000 years.[10]
EXPLO project and prehistoric land use
In 2018, Tinner co-initiated the EXPLO project (Exploring the Dynamics and Causes of Prehistoric Land Use Change in the Cradle of European Farming), which received a European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant of 6.4 million euros. The ERC Synergy Grant has an acceptance rate of less than 10 percent and this was the first such grant awarded to the University of Bern.[11] The project is a collaboration between the University of Bern, the University of Oxford, and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, combining underwater archaeology, paleoecology, and dynamic computer modelling to investigate how early farming communities in Greece and the southern Balkans interacted with their environment over the past 10,000 years.[12][13] The project carried out excavations and sediment coring at prehistoric settlement sites on Lake Ohrid, Lake Prespa, and lakes in northern Greece, yielding new chronologies for Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements.[14]
In 2024, Tinner co-edited (with Albert Hafner and Ariane Ballmer) the volume Prehistoric Wetland Sites of Southern Europe in Springer's Natural Science in Archaeology series, the first comprehensive treatment of prehistoric lake dwelling settlements from a Southern European perspective.[15]
Alpine biodiversity and vegetation modelling
A 2025 study published in Nature Communications, involving Tinner's research group, used sedimentary ancient DNA from 14 Alpine lakes to track 603 plant taxa and 11 mammal species over 14,000 years. The study found that wild ungulates and cattle had a stronger influence on alpine plant diversity than temperature over the past 2,000 years, with implications for conservation policy in mountain regions.[16] Tinner has also contributed to research on dynamic vegetation modelling, using computer simulations validated by paleoecological data to estimate how species and vegetation may respond to future climate change.[4]
Academic impact
Tinner is one of the most cited paleoecologists in the world. According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited more than 23,500 times and he has an h-index of 84.[5] On Research.com, he holds a discipline-specific h-index of 73 in Ecology and Evolution and is ranked 23rd nationally in Switzerland and 823rd worldwide in his field.[17] His most cited publications include studies on European fire history, the 8.2 ka climate event, chestnut cultivation history, and global wildfire responses to abrupt climate change.[5][17]
Tinner serves on the editorial board of Vegetation History and Archaeobotany and has been a grant reviewer for the US National Science Foundation, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany), and other national research councils. He has also served as a journal reviewer for Nature, Nature Geoscience, PNAS, Quaternary Science Reviews, and other journals.[2]
Public engagement
Tinner has contributed to science communication through media appearances and documentary film. In 2024, he appeared in the RSI (Italian-speaking Swiss public television) documentary La pazienza del faggio (The Patience of the Beech), exploring the ecological history of the European beech and the threats it faces from climate change.[18] In 2025, the WSL magazine Diagonal featured his work on hidden populations of silver fir (Abies alba) in the Tuscany and Ticino regions, which surprised researchers by thriving in warm, low-altitude Mediterranean conditions.[19] A 2026 feature in Pro Natura magazine profiled Tinner under the title "Die Paläoökologie ist wie eine Zeitmaschine" (Paleoecology is like a time machine), describing how he uses pollen from ancient sediments to reconstruct plant communities extending back more than 100,000 years.[20] His group's research on Bronze Age lake shore settlements has also been covered in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.[21]
Tinner is also a member of the management board of the Natural History Society in Bern (Naturforschende Gesellschaft Bern), an institution established in 1786, and convenor of the International Moor Excursion, an annual meeting of paleoecologists held at various field sites.[2]
Affiliations
- Head of the Paleoecology Section, Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern[1]
- Member of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR)[2]
- Co-chair of the Scientific Steering Committee, PAGES (Past Global Changes), 2017 to 2022[3]
- Associated Editor, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany[2]
- Management Board, Natural History Society in Bern[2]
Selected publications
- Tinner, W.; Conedera, M.; Ammann, B.; Gäggeler, H.W. (1998). "Pollen and charcoal in lake sediments compared with historically documented forest fires in southern Switzerland since AD 1920". The Holocene. 8 (1): 31–42.
- Tinner, W.; Hubschmid, P.; Wehrli, M.; Ammann, B.; Conedera, M. (1999). "Long-term forest fire ecology and dynamics in southern Switzerland". Journal of Ecology. 87 (2): 273–289.
- Tinner, W.; Lotter, A.F. (2001). "Central European vegetation response to abrupt climate change at 8.2 ka". Geology. 29 (6): 551–554.
- Tinner, W.; Hu, F.S. (2003). "Size parameters, size-class distribution and area-number relationship of microscopic charcoal: relevance for fire reconstruction". The Holocene. 13 (4): 499–505.
- Conedera, M.; Krebs, P.; Tinner, W.; Pradella, M. (2004). "The cultivation of Castanea sativa (Mill.) in Europe, from its origin to its diffusion on a continental scale". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 13 (3): 161–179.
- Tinner, W.; Conedera, M.; Ammann, B.; Lotter, A.F. (2005). "Fire ecology north and south of the Alps since the last ice age". The Holocene. 15 (8): 1214–1226.
- Ballmer, A.; Hafner, A.; Tinner, W. (2024). Prehistoric Wetland Sites of Southern Europe. Natural Science in Archaeology. Springer.