Dr. Mark Vanderwel

Biography

Mark Vanderwel is an Associate Professor at the University of Regina, specializing in tree demography and forest dynamics in the context of global change. His research aims to understand how forests are affected by global changes, focusing primarily on tree-level demographic processes and how they interact with disturbances to create changing patterns in the structure, biomass, and diversity of forest stands and landscapes. Vanderwel employs a quantitative approach in developing process-based models that examine the dynamics of forests and how variations in demographic performance of individual trees and species along environmental gradients influence overall forest dynamics. He is particularly interested in the impact of climate change and disturbances on the growth, mortality, and recruitment of trees, and how these processes affect the broader health of forest ecosystems over time. Current research projects focus on the role of water stress in regulating standing biomass and the geographic distribution of forests in western Canada, a region anticipated to experience increasing drought in the coming decades. Vanderwel’s work investigates mortality and recruitment processes that are influenced by water availability, with the aim of predicting the broader implications for forest carbon stocks in the western boreal region.

Research Interests