Address:

I. Colin Prentice
Leader, QUEST
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Bristol
Wills Memorial Building
Queen's Road
Clifton
Bristol
BS8 1RJ
United Kingdom

Tel: (0117) 331 5019
Fax: (01793) 411501
Email: Colin.Prentice@bristol.ac.uk

http://quest.bris.ac.uk/

Roles in IGBP:

IGBP-GCTE task leader, Dynamic Global Vegetation Modelling (1998-)
IGBP Carbon Working Group (1998-)
IGBP-GAIM Task Force (1998-)

Research Interests:

QUEST has an ambitious goal: to be in the forefront of discoveries about the linkages among the geosphere, biosphere and human activities. These are highly complex and only very partially understood at present. Over time, the dichotomy between humans and "environment" has given way to the realization that we live in and are part of a coupled global system that involves powerful interactions between living and non-living components. There is strong evidence for these interactions both in the geological record and in measurements being made today, which show that human activities are beginning to cause profound alterations in the composition of the atmosphere and the nature of the global climate. These changes in turn will necessarily have feedback effects on the human enterprise. We still have a very limited understanding of how these feedbacks will work. Yet, as scientists, we are increasingly under pressure to give answers to "what if" questions related to the development of policies for adaptation to or mitigation of global environmental change. In order to answer these questions more satisfactorily than we can today we need to better understand both the "natural" workings of the Earth System and the interactions between the global environment and human society.

Other affiliations/interests:
- CLA for IPCC TAR, WGI, Chapter 3 "Carbon Cycle and Atmospheric CO_²"
- Editorial boards: Climate Dynamics, Global Change Biology
- UK National Environment Research Council – member of Science and Technology Board