Albertus J. Dolman
The 2013 Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Medal is awarded to Albertus J. Dolman for his important contributions to biogeosciences, in particular to the terrestrial carbon and water cycles, ecohydrology, and the interactions with land use and climate change.
Albertus J. Dolman is, since 2001, the Professor of Ecohydrology at the Free University (Vrije Universiteit) of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and is head of the Department of Geo-environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences. In 1989, Dolman obtained the prestigious fellowship form the UK Central Electricity Generation Board and worked until 1992 at the Institute of Hydrology, UK. During this time, he published a seminal paper on modelling rainfall interception in climate models and developed the land-surface scheme that is still the basis of the Hadley Centre climate model. From 1993 to 2001 he was senior researcher in ecohydrology and climate hydrology at the Winand Staring Centre for Integrated Land, Soil and Water Research in Alterra-Wageningen, The Netherlands, and pioneered the use of the eddy-covariance technique for continuous measurements of water and carbon fluxes. He was a founding member and one of the driving forces of the EuroFlux project. In 1998 and 2009 he worked as a visiting scientist at the Brazilian Space Research Institute and worked on modelling of biosphere-atmosphere interactions in the Amazon region.
Besides his role in fostering the surface flux measurements in Europe, Dolman developed international field experiments, including the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia, and he led the validation effort of the Global Soil Wetness Project. Dolman was elected chair of the FP6 CarboEurope Cluster, the world’s most sophisticated project for observing and modelling continental scale balance. By acting as member of the advisory board of CarbOcean, Dolman played a pivotal role in integrating European terrestrial and marine carbon research.
In 2008, he was elected chair of the Terrestrial Panel for Climate Change, he chaired the Global Land Group of the EU’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security project, and was also member of the Mission Advisory Group of AScope. Besides activities in international panels, he is currently taking a leading role in CarboEurope-GHG and Integrated Carbon Observation System infrastructures and is coordinating the European programme to harmonise global carbon observations. Dolman’s research resulted in so-far more than 175 scientific peer-reviewed publications which are highly cited by the international community.
For his important contributions to biogeosciences, in particular to the ecology of the terrestrial carbon and water cycles, and the interactions with land use and climate change, Dolman is a worthy recipient of the Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Medal. He has been a tremendous driver to the scientific community through coordination and integration, and theoretical and experimental innovation, mentorship and community outreach.