Vanessa Haverd

Vanessa Haverd has a Ph.D. in chemistry (Oxford University, 2003), and joined the Continental Biogeochemical Cycles Team at CSIRO in 2007 as a terrestrial biosphere modeller. She has developed new descriptions of fundamental physical processes, including coupled transport of heat, water and stable isotopes in soil and litter, encapsulated in the SLI (Soil-Litter-Isotope) model; heat storage in canopies; and radiative transfer in canopies. In 2013, she published the first complete carbon budget for the Australian continent, quantifying the contribution of the Australian biosphere to the global carbon budget, using multiple observational constraints. More recently, she has developed a novel approach to representing vegetation structural dynamics in Earth system modeling, introducing vegetation structure and disturbance patterns into land surface models.