Klaus Butterbach-Bahl

The 2014 Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Medal is awarded to Klaus Butterbach-Bahl for his outstanding contribution to investigations and modelling of the biosphere-atmosphere exchange of environmentally important trace substances.

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl is an outstanding biogeoscientist who has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of global change feedbacks in terrestrial ecosystems and the exchange of trace gases between the biosphere and the atmosphere. His main research achievements are the quantitative estimation of greenhouse gas exchange, specifically methane, carbon dioxide and nitrogenous species (NO, N2O) at regional and global levels, in addition to modelling ecosystem carbon and nitrogen turnover and their exchange between ecosystems and the atmosphere.

Butterbach-Bahl is well known for his studies on the biosphere-atmosphere exchange of environmentally important trace substances. He was awarded as an Honorary Principal Fellow with the School of Forest and Ecosystem Science, University of Melbourne, Australia in 2006 and became an Honorary Research Professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing in 2005. He is also well known for his field and laboratory experiments designed to quantify and characterise nitorgen and carbon gas production, consumption and emission processes in various ecosystems worldwide and his research on the topic has been published in several highly cited research and review papers.

Butterbach-Bahl has built up a strong team of specialists who manage a broad network of environmental studies across the globe. The spectrum of new process-oriented models suggested by Butterbach-Bahl and his co-workers cover all scales, from biogeochemistry within soil microzones to the regional and global scale. His achievements and ongoing work in the mechanisms of greenhouse gas exchange make Butterbach-Bahl a worthy recipient of the Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Medal.