Josep Penuelas

Issues of study

Some of the most outstanding results of his research are the following ones: discovery of ecophysiological mechanisms linked to the carbon and oxygen use that help to explain species distribution; the development of increasingly used remote sensing techniques to assess plant and ecosystem functioning; the report of current evidences of global change, climate change, and air pollution interactions with structure and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems; the study of the biochemistry, function and effects of the emissions of the Volatile Organic Compounds by plants and ecosystems, the introduction of metabolomics in field ecology, as well as the development of policies for environmental protection and sustainable development.

He is highly cited Highly Cited Researchers scientist in ecology/environment, in plant and animal sciences, agricultural sciences, geosciences and in all science fields of the ISI essential science indicators (Thomson Reuters).

His recent subjects of study are global change, climate change, atmospheric pollution, biogenic volatile organic compounds emissions, remote sensing, plant ecophysiology, and functioning and structure of terrestrial plants and ecosystems.

He has been principal investigator or scientific coordinator of several European Union, Spanish and Catalan projects financed by public research agencies and by private funding. Among them he has been awarded with ERC-Synergy 2014-2019 grant for the IMBALANCE-P project [1].

He has published 6 books on ecology, more than 800 papers in scientific journals and books (more than 600 in journals of the Science Citation Index, including Nature, Science and PNAS), 300 in other jornals and chapters of bookcs, and more than 250 articles on popular science in Catalan and Spanish newspapers. It is also outstanding his labour popularizing science issues at international and national scale.

He is currently member of the editorial board of Ecology Letters [2], Global Change Biology [3], Global Ecology and Biogeography [4], New Phytologist, Remote Sensing of the Environment, Atmospheric Pollution Research, e-Forestry, Journal of Plant Ecology, Journal of Botany and Plant Ecology and Diversity and Trees. He collaborates in the reviewing of articles in many scientific journals, such as Science, Nature, Nature Geoscience, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (USA), Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Trends in Plant Science. He also evaluates scientific projects for several international and national programmes. He is a member of several academies and international and national scientific associations.

National and International recognition

He has received several awards-prizes both national and international (Conde de Barcelona 1990; NASA 1993; Science Ministry of Japan 1998;Medi Ambient Institut d'Estudis Catalans-Caixa Sabadell 2008; I Premi Nacional de Recerca de Catalunya 2010; Silver badge of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans [5] (October 27, 2014); Premio Rey Jaime I 2015; Doctor Honoris causa by the Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia, 2016; Adoptive son of Figueres, 2016; Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology (Premi Ramon Margalef d'Ecologia} 2016…). He was the president of Institució Catalana d'Història Natural and adviser of CADS (Consell Assessor per al Desenvolupament Sostenible), Generalitat of Catalonia.

In 2016 he was awarded the Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology (Premi Ramon Margalef d'Ecologia} as one of the most cited researchers in the fields of ecology and the environment.